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Old 24-08-06, 11:24 AM   #2
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A Nation Divided Over Piracy
Quinn Norton

Last Jan. 1, almost on a whim, 35-year-old IT manager Rickard Falkvinge got into politics.

Concerned about the reach of copyright and patent law, Falkvinge erected a web page with a sign-up form for a radical new pro-piracy party to compete in Sweden's parliamentary system. He didn't know if anyone would care, but the next day the national media picked it up, and two days later international media started calling.

The site was flooded with new members -- enough for the nascent movement to sail past the requirements for participation in the national election. Falkvinge now faced a decision: stay with his nice job and let the whole thing quietly sink, or quit and become a campaigning politician. He chose to become the leader of Sweden's newest and fastest-growing political party: Piratpartiet, or the Pirate Party.

Did the Motion Picture Association ask Swedish politicians to illegally intercede with law enforcement? Read the docs and decide for yourself.

Striding through the narrow, cobbled streets of Gamla Stan, Falkvinge looks nothing like a politician in his "Pirat" baseball cap and polo shirt. "We have a lot in common with the environmental movement," he says. Where environmentalists see destruction of natural resources, the pirates see culture at risk. "(We) saw a lot of hidden costs to society in the way companies maximize their copyright."

Falkvinge is interrupted by a passing teenager. She's a young punk, with green dreads and a jacket covered in an indistinguishable combination of angry quips and band names -- in short, exactly the type who once would have spent her disposable income on music.

She takes out a piece of notebook paper and asks Falkvinge for an autograph.

Lawyers, academics and pirates agree: File sharing is an institution here. Sweden has faster broadband with deeper penetration than just about anywhere in the world. That, combined with the techno-friendly attitude that pervades Scandinavia and a government slow to take any kind of action, allowed file sharing to root deeply in practice and popular culture.

In March, game show contestant Petter Nilsson won the politically themed Top Candidates show by delivering speeches supporting file sharing, and committing to donating 20 percent of his $30,000 winning to the Pirate Bay. A cultural minister from a southern Sweden municipality admitted in June to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that he downloaded music on a daily basis, and called for more adults to "come out of the file-sharing closet." Last May's raid on the Pirate Bay sparked street protests and cyberattacks on government websites.

But it was the spike in the Pirate Party's numbers after the raid that might have the most lasting consequences for Sweden. Membership shot past the nation's Green Party, which holds 17 seats in the Riksdag, Sweden's parliament. There's no guarantee that membership will translate into votes, but the pirates have raised enough funds to print 3 million ballots for next month's election, and they have enough volunteers to get them out to all the polling places.

This week, the Pirate Party broke out its own version of a chicken in every pot when it endorsed a low-cost, encrypted anonymizing service offered by a Swedish communications company called Relakks. For 5 euros a month, a portion of which goes to the party, anyone can share files or communicate from a Relakks IP address in Sweden, potentially complicating efforts to track downloaders. The party endorsement generated enough interest to cause performance issues on the new service.

Falkvinge may be learning the ropes of glad-handing and political speechmaking, but a guileless fan boy slips out when I introduce him to the founders of Piratbyran -- the pro-piracy group that created the Pirate Bay in 2003, and inspired Falkvinge's foray into renegade politics. He introduces the punk girl that recognized him to co-founder Rasmus Fleischer with a hurried explanation -- "Piratbyran, Piratbryan!" -- and Fleischer soon finds himself autographing another piece of notebook paper, looking confused.

Piratbyran, or "Pirate Bureau," is hard to nail down as an organization. It is best described as an ad hoc pro-piracy think tank, but Fleischer's partner in the effort, Marcus Kaarto, won't even go that far. "We're like a gas," Kaarto says, laughing. "You can't get a hold on us."

Founded in 2003, Piratbyran is older than the Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party. The group has 58,000 members registered on its website, but its structure is informal, and no one seems to know exactly how much money it has. It gets by on donations, including contributions through the Pirate Bay -- with which it is no longer officially affiliated.

Kaarto and Fleischer aren't the typical think tank or political types. Fleischer is a classically trained musician and former leftist journalist; Kaarto plays poker for a living. They are comfortable and funny twenty-somethings in cargo shorts, dark T-shirts and imprecise haircuts -- blending artist and geek in a way that is uniquely European.

They walk me around Soder, the island in the middle of Stockholm that went from working class to gentrified bohemian in the '80s. Eventually we land in Medborgarplatsen, a square that hosts Stockholm's large communist May Day demonstration every year, and entertainment/retail the rest of the time. This night it's full of cafe-goers, and posters advertising the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie -- a film destined to break box office records and top the downloading charts at the same time.

Over the din, Fleischer says the Piratbyran's message isn't so much about fighting the copyfight as explaining to the other side that they've already lost. "Their business model won't work with digital technology," he says.

In Fleischer's world, the Motion Picture Association of America and rights holders are attacking digital technology itself, trying to hang on to an outdated model. "It's an inevitability that digital data will be copied.... The alternative to peer-to-peer piracy is person-to-person piracy," he says. While some online pirates take pains to distinguish themselves from those who sell counterfeit DVDs and CDs, he sees such physical bootlegging as just "a symptom of underdeveloped computer networks."

When asked about compensation for artists, both men reject the language itself. No artist sits down to "create content," Fleischer says. "Culture has always been heterogeneous," and money is only one way of rewarding creativity. The idea of a rights holder, like a record label or movie studio, that patronizes and distributes human creativity is, for Fleischer, "a very strange utopia that has never existed."

But Piratbyran is not dedicated to copyright or patent abolition -- it has no legislative agenda. It holds a nuanced view of the created work itself: Each work must find its own social and economic niche. "I don't think of this (as) the big battle," says Fleischer, "but thousands of microbattles."

Part of the surprise of Sweden is how far this approach has gotten them. Kaarto and Fleischer are quoted in the press frequently, often accorded the same respect a law professor would receive in the United States. Last year the pair co-edited Copy Me, a collection of essays about intellectual property; the first run of 2,300 sold out, and another is on its way.

Their positions find fertile ground in politics and public opinion. Piracy is the subject of serious debate here, rather than crime-busting press releases. And copyright's defenders find themselves in an uphill battle for the soul of the nation.

Attorney Monique Wadsted, the MPAA's representative here, has the hardest job in Sweden -- not just to try to enforce copyright under an indifferent and occasionally hostile regime, but to convince the average Swede that file sharing is wrong.

She meets me in a corner conference room in her office high above a square full of Scandinavian hipsters and the punky goth kids of Stockholm. With a knit brow, she explains that she never expected Sweden to become a rogue nation.

"(It's) become a copyright haven, a territory where you spread everything without fear of prosecution," Wadsted says.

Wadsted knows Fleischer -- she recently stood in a public debate with him at the formal opening of Sweden's election campaign season. She was not impressed. "Nobody has ever presented a good argument why this should be free.... They like to talk about music; they have a problem with (talking about) movies, because movies cost a lot to make."

Movies are Wadsted's passion, as well as her job, and she seems prepared to throw herself bodily between the medium she loves and the pirates who threaten its financial lifeblood. As a child, "I would see (movies) with my family ... or sneak off to see them on my own, all the time," she says.

And if file sharing and the Pirate Bay had existed when she was young? She confesses she doesn't know if she'd have been a downloader herself. "Would I have known any better at 14?" she muses, leaving the question unanswered.

What's certain is she'd like to see the Pirate Bay's crew in jail.

The copyright fight is getting tense in Sweden. Wadsted speaks emotionally of threats made against her and anti-piracy spokesman Henrik Pontien. She says her address has appeared online, accompanied by talk of firebombing. Ugly suggestions have been made against Pontien and his children.

Wadsted says she knew she was opening herself up for criticism by becoming the public face of the MPAA in Sweden, but the experience has clearly frightened and shocked her.

The Pirate Bay's crew hasn't been spared much from the other side.

They've been called gang members, terrorists and even child pornographers. While they laugh whenever the subject comes up, they too seem incredulous that the debate has come to this point. There's no evidence that extremists on either side will take violent action, but the idea that a previously obscure area of law excites such fanatical rhetoric was unthinkable before file sharing.

Sweden stands at a crossroads. "There will be many Pirate Bays if this case doesn't succeed," says Marianne Levin, professor of private law and intellectual property at the University of Stockholm. Everyone -- pirates and lawyers and politicians -- agrees: Sweden probably won't continue to be friendly ground for overt pirates if the Pirate Bay is convicted. That's the point of pursuing its operators.

But even with a victory in court, Levin and her doctoral research students acknowledge that Swedish file sharing isn't going to stop. They talk a lot about alternatives: mitigation and compromise. One oft-proposed solution would levy a tax on internet access that would be redistributed to artists -- but as distinctions between professionals and amateurs get more fuzzy, it's harder to make such a system fair.

A tax would also mean more payouts to the porn industry than is politically feasible, points out legal researcher Viveca Still, a faculty member at the Institute of International Economic Law in Helsinki, Finland. That's one reason Still joins many academics in advocating a technological solution: digital rights management, or DRM, in which music and movie players -- software or hardware -- would simply refuse to cooperate with pirates.

But a strict DRM regime has problems, too: For one, it would require hard-coded limits on digital technology itself. "This would lead to outlawing digital technology ... the Turing machine (itself)," says Piratbyran's Kaarto. This is a price too high for society to pay to protect intellectual property, according to DRM opponents.

If piracy's foes offer flawed solutions, Sweden's pirates concede that their own vision isn't utopian. Parting with many copyright minimalists in the United States, Piratbyran acknowledges that file sharing can do real harm to rights holders. When Kaarto and Fleischer discuss this aspect of their movement, their flippancy fades, and their mood becomes reflective. Fleischer tells the story of Swedish jazz in 1962.

When pop music came to Sweden, it hit hard enough that in a single summer most of Sweden's jazz artists were left scrambling for a livelihood. Just as silent movies destroyed theater, then talkies left the silent stars unemployed, progress, he hints, always creates losers as well as winners.

But progress has to be accommodated anyway, says Kaarto. "You have to change the map, not the world."

Later, the Pirate Bay's Peter (who doesn't want his last name revealed, in part for fear it would endanger his day job) is dining with a crew of pirates from all over Europe. Over tabbouleh and sausage, the talk turns to strategy: how to create media events, awareness campaigns, educational programs to let people know that piracy isn't about free movies -- it's about clearing the way for culture to progress.

Peter talks about expanding the Pirate Bay beyond the current 25-language translation. He turns to me, with bright eyes: "We want to make a Pirate Bay for kids!"

Sebastian Gjerding of Denmark's Piratgruppen warms to the idea, and starts talking about designing a poster to hang in schools, teaching children how to share files. The pirates bandy about names for the campaign and seem, for the moment, to settle on "iCopy."

Later, I'm in Peter's old BMW station wagon. "One day, all these cars will run on hydrogen," Peter proclaims, gesturing around Malmo.

"How will they make the hydrogen?" I ask.

He answers quickly, smiling, "I don't know!"

But, he assures me, they will and it isn't his problem to figure out how.

It's not the problem of the pirates, he tells me later, to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system -- someone else will figure that out. Their job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.

If the next thing isn't good enough, they will tear that down, too.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...tw=wn_index_23





The YouTube Election
Ryan Lizza

AUGUST, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube, the vast videosharing Web site.

Last week, Senator George Allen, the Virginia Republican, was caught on tape at a campaign event twice calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca,” an obscure racial slur.

The student, working for the opposing campaign, taped the comments, and the video quickly appeared on YouTube, where it rocketed to the top of the site’s most-viewed list. It then bounced from the Web to the front page of The Washington Post to cable and network television news shows. Despite two public apologies by Senator Allen, and his aides’ quick explanations for how the strange word tumbled out, political analysts rushed to downgrade Mr. Allen’s stock as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

YouTube’s bite also hurt Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who was defeated by the political upstart Ned Lamont in Connecticut’s Democratic primary earlier this month. In that contest, pro-Lamont bloggers frequently posted flattering interviews with their candidate on YouTube and unflattering video of Senator Lieberman. The Lamont campaign even hired a staffer, Tim Tagaris, to coordinate the activities of the bloggers and video bloggers.

In the real world, of course, neither Senator Lieberman nor Senator Allen is finished. Senator Lieberman, running as an independent, leads in recent polls. And Senator Allen, who said that he had meant no insult and that he did not know what macaca meant, is favored to win re-election against his Democratic opponent, James Webb. But the experience serves as a warning to politicians: Beware, the next stupid thing you say may be on YouTube.

When politicians say inappropriate things, many voters will want to know. Now they can see it for themselves on the Web.

But YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways, for good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists in both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?

YouTube didn’t even exist until 2005, but it now attracts some 20 million different visitors a month. In statements to the press, the company has been quick to take credit for radically altering the political ecosystem by opening up elections, allowing lesser known candidates to have a platform.

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,” said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.”

But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity.

“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”

He sees a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. “What’s happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1,” he said. “It’s taken some richness out of the political discourse.”

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees.

“It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”

These rules have long applied to White House contenders, but the dynamic is getting stronger and moving down the ballot. “It used to be the kind of thing that was only true for presidents,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Now with the proliferation of technology it is increasingly true for many other politicians.”

But Mr. Wolfson, who recently led an effort by the Clinton camp to reach out to liberal bloggers hostile to his boss, believes that this trend has one advantage. “It does create more accountability and more democratization of information in the process,” he said.

The explosion of instant video may also put pressure on the news media. In the old days, the Allen video would not have been available for all to see. “Imagine this happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We had video and trackers then. But you had to get it to a TV station or newspaper. You had to persuade them to run a story on it. This allows you to avoid the middleman.”

And by doing so, avoid an arbiter, however flawed, of standards. “There’s no, ‘Is this the right thing for political discourse?’ ” Mr. Dowd said. “It’s just there.”

These days journalists are concerned not just about being cut out, but about being part of the show. Reporters often suffer the wrath of bloggers in the same way politicians do. At a recent conference of political bloggers in Las Vegas, reporters more than once reminded one another to be discreet in their conversations because anything overheard was fair game for bloggers to post.

Now, as the campaign trail turns into a 24-hour live set, members of the press corps may find themselves starring on YouTube. “At least one big-time journalist will have their career or life ruined because some element of their behavior that was heretofore private will be exposed publicly,” predicted a senior adviser to a potential 2008 presidential candidate. The adviser requested that his name not be used because he did not want his personal views to be taken for his boss’s.

Then again, YouTube’s impact on politics may be exaggerated. For one, the site’s users are generally young and not highly engaged politically.

“Most social networking sites cater to younger audiences, 18 to 24,” says Michael Bassik, vice president of Internet advertising at MSHC Partners, which advises candidates on media strategies. “For the most part, it’s not political conversations taking place there.”

And maybe the Allen video wasn’t all that shocking after all.

Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and an Internet consultant to The New York Times Company, doesn’t think all that much has changed.

“Is it news that politicians say stupid things?” he asks. “Of course not.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/we...w/20lizza.html





Finding a Friendly Court Is Not So Easy
Jonathan D. Glater

PLANNING a legal battle on a big constitutional case would seem to have little in common with making a real estate decision, but any lawyer will tell you that often the same thing matters in both arenas: location.

When lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union were deciding where to file their case against the Bush administration’s policy of wiretapping the international communications of some Americans without a court warrant, they chose Detroit, more specifically the United States District Court there. And last week a judge on that court, Anna Diggs Taylor, ruled that eavesdropping on telephone and Internet communications “without benefit of warrant or other judicial approval” violated the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.

No one has said that filing the same case elsewhere would have led to a different outcome. Nor do lawyers generally claim that where a case is filed determines how a judge will dispose of it. After all, justice is supposed to be blind, guided only by the facts presented and the law.

Nonetheless, lawyers say that anyone who does not think carefully about what court to file a lawsuit in, as well as what judge might preside and who might sit on a jury, acts foolishly. “The forum can be critically important,” said Derek Shaffer, executive director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.

In some instances that might mean finding the particular district whose judges have proved receptive in the past or, in a case like that challenging the eavesdropping policy, it might mean filing within a more sympathetic circuit court of appeals. “You want the circuit with the precedent that’s more favorable to your view of the case,” Mr. Shaffer said.

Jameel Jaffer, counsel for the A.C.L.U. in the eavesdropping case, said there were two reasons Michigan was selected. “The last time the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance was a case that came out of the Sixth Circuit,” Mr. Jaffer said, referring to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the government’s appeal of Judge Taylor’s decision. “The other reason we filed in Michigan is because many of our clients are in Michigan.” This case is a little unusual, Mr. Jaffer added, because the lawyers who brought it fully expect the decision by Judge Taylor, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, to be reviewed not just by an appellate court but also by the Supreme Court. In a simpler, more typical case that did not involve broad constitutional principles but basic issues of fact — a slip-and-fall case, for example — a district court decision could well have the last word.

To try to anticipate how receptive different courts might be to particular claims, lawyers review how appellate courts resolved similar cases in the past, because those precedents are binding on lower courts, said Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington group critical of affirmative action. “You can tell by the case law.”

But even that is not an infallible guide, he added. In one case Mr. Clegg worked on while at the Justice Department, he expected a conservative appellate panel that would have ruled his way and instead found himself facing a different panel of three judges appointed by President Carter. The government lost.

“These things happen,” he said.

Lawyers who specialize in certain areas develop a feel for local courts. Meriem L. Hubbard, a principal attorney in the property-rights group of the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, said California state courts were generally viewed as less friendly to the claims of property owners affected by government action than federal courts were.

But reliance on generalizations is risky, she said. To pick a court in a specific case, she continued, “I would look at state court and federal court precedents and see how they ruled on the subject matter of my case.”

Conventional wisdom has it that judges appointed by Democratic presidents lean to the left and judges appointed by Republican presidents lean right, and that judges’ political views can sway cases. But any analysis can become complicated quickly, because a judge generally viewed as sympathetic to the government may exhibit a libertarian streak when it comes to certain subjects like eavesdropping without a warrant.

Though trial lawyers say they must think about where to file, the idea of “forum-shopping” to find the most favorable courthouse has a bad name — perhaps in part because it conjures up images of slick plaintiffs’ lawyers filing absurd claims in obscure courthouses where juries will give them multimillion-dollar verdicts.

“There’s a pejorative connotation,” said Michael E. Rosman, general counsel at the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative organization in Washington specializing in civil rights cases. “The idea is, if you really had a strong case, you could sue anywhere.”

Scholars differ over how exactly judges decide cases before them, Mr. Shaffer said. “There are those who believe it’s just a matter of human bias and human instinct.”

To talk about whether different courts decide cases differently is to begin a complicated discussion that can challenge notions of fundamental fairness, he continued. If the same facts, presented to different judges in different courts can lead to different outcomes, then can anyone maintain confidence that a particular outcome was just?

In the eavesdropping case, Mr. Jaffer said that deciding where to file was less important than knowing where the case will end up. “Ultimately,” he said, “it will be the Supreme Court.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/we.../20glater.html





DCIA Writes to Congress
Thomas Mennecke

Who is the DCIA? The DCIA is the Distributed Computer Industry Association, a trade organization that lobbies on behalf of commercial P2P developers. What’s a commercial P2P developer? A commercial P2P developer represents a growing aspect of file-sharing, composed of networks that were once considered "unauthorized."

But not every commercial P2P developer/company belongs to the DCIA. The DCIA has a specific membership of over 80 companies, with such familiar names as Sharman Networks, Grokster, Altnet, and Brilliant Digital. Noticeably absent from the DCIA is LimeWire, who once belonged to P2P United, a seemingly defunct P2P lobby group.

In the DCIA’s ongoing struggle to persuade the Congress of the United States that file-sharing has legitimate and practical uses beyond unauthorized content distribution; CEO Marty Lafferty has penned a letter to our representatives with the intentions of convincing, or at least earning the consideration, of the DCIA’s intentions. Seven years since the advent of mainstream file-sharing under Napster, this task continues to prove difficult, as the entertainment industry continues to struggle against unauthorized file-sharing networks.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has been overwhelmingly successful against various commercial operators, and earned a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2005. The MGM vs. Grokster decision gave the entertainment industry a new weapon in their enforcement arsenal. The Supreme Court ruled that P2P developers were indeed responsible for the actions of their users if they encouraged copyright infringement, otherwise known as inducing copyright infringement. Although intrinsically the decision was remanded to the lower courts and technically not a victory, it gave the RIAA the ammunition it needed to wipe out most American based P2P developers. The notable exception is BitTorrent, Inc., who has so far avoided a similar fate to Grokster because of its relationship with the MPAA.

The fly in the ointment, for interestingly enough the DCIA and RIAA, is that none of the thwarted networks have a controlling interest in the overall size, distribution, and development of the file-sharing community. Grokster was destroyed, true enough. But Grokster connected to the FastTrack network; which has struggled in recent years to hold on to its once impressive audience. iMesh was forced to transition to a pay-model network at a modest price of $4.1 million (compared to Grokster’s 50 million, BearShare’s 30 million, and Sharman’s 100 million), yet this client also belonged to FastTrack. BearShare was also banished, yet belongs to the Gnutella network which is controlled by the open source community. Similarly, eDonkey was forced to “throw in the towel”, yet this client which connects to the eDonkey2000 network only has an approximate 10% share in the overall size of this massive community.

So where does this leave everyone? The DCIA is faced with the challenge of convincing the US government, and to a lesser extent the RIAA, that their organization is a completely separate entity from the unauthorized file-sharing factions. It also has to convince both entities that it’s committed to protecting and respecting intellectual property rights. P2P clients that belong to the DCIA, except for Sharman Network’s Kazaa, have incorporated various mechanisms to deter, if not prevent, unauthorized file-sharing (Kazaa is expected to incorporate such mechanisms as part of their settlement.)

With the absence of every P2P application and network blocking unauthorized files, the DCIA must show it’s committed to protecting intellectual property rights by alternative methods. This is where Altnet’s claimed ownership of hash code technology comes into play. In Marty Lafferty’s letter to congress, the DCIA CEO explains how ISPs can mitigate copyright infringement by taking advantage of such technology. In the letter, Marty Lafferty expresses that his members are actively settling with the entertainment industry, and also developing the means to enforce their settlement agreements.

“1) Files transferred via decentralized P2P protocols are identified by a pre-assigned unique known file identifier. This unique identity of each file can in turn serve as a homing device for routers at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to target, with pinpoint accuracy, those files which need to be acted upon to enforce copyright infringement, eradicate criminally obscene content, or protect national security interests.

“2) Targeted files, for example, could include known occurrences of child pornography, identity theft, and terrorist communications, as well as unauthorized copies of music, movies, games, and software. As noted above, the technologies required to accomplish this major improvement are available, inexpensive, and will have the added benefit of greatly reducing demand for bandwidth due to the resultant reduction in voluminous large-file piracy, such as for unlicensed redistribution of music collections, feature-length films, television program series, videogames, and computer programs.

“ 3) Files that are not targeted remain free to pass through: they are not disturbed, opened, reviewed, or compromised in any way. Privacy of underlying data (and users associated with that data) is upheld with the same high regard enjoyed by the public today. The adoption of these anti-piracy solutions will enable P2P to realize its full potential as the most cost-effective and efficient distribution channel for copyrighted works.”

Hash codes, file-hashes, magnet links, verified links, or whatever they’re called these days, are tricky little devices that have indeed rendered attempts to flood P2P networks with false files nearly impotent. While it’s true that verified files could be blocked by zeroing in on a specific hash code, the slightest change to the file structure also radically alters the hash code – while leaving the file intact to the ears or eyes of the end user. While the DCIA is likely committed to ensuring its end of the bargain with the entertainment industry, it remains to be seen how ISPs will react, as they have a much larger consumer base to keep satisfied.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1273





Online Music Holdouts Give in to iTunes
Brian Charlton

Bob Seger turned the page, and Metallica finally found justice for online fans. Now, only a few remaining big-name musical acts refuse to make their songs available on Apple Computer's popular iTunes Music Store.

Analysts say the online holdouts - including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Garth Brooks, Radiohead and Kid Rock - probably can't avoid iTunes forever as fans flock to the Internet to buy music.

But the artists argue online distribution leaves them with too small a profit. And, they say, iTunes wrecks the artistic integrity of an album by allowing songs to be purchased by the track for 99 cents. Some bands, such as AC/DC have released albums on other, more flexible sites, but not iTunes.

"We've always thought certain artists put out albums that aren't meant to be compilations with 50 other artists," said Ed "Punch" Andrews, manager for both Seger and Kid Rock. "We're hoping at some point albums become important again like they were in the past 30 years."

There are other reasons bands avoid cyberspace. In some cases, various parties that own or control older music catalogs can't agree to a distribution contract. Others have avoided the Internet altogether out of piracy concerns. (Most online stores, however, use rights-management technology to protect against unauthorized distribution.)

Since record companies have realized the popularity of iTunes and other sites, many reworked contracts to give artists less money per download. Andrews said while record companies once offered artists about 30 cents for each song sold, now musicians are earning less than a dime.

Contractual issues, the fight to save full-length albums and worries about piracy have kept both Seger and Kid Rock from distributing their works online, Andrews said. Seger, however, did allow online stores to sell his new single "Wait For Me," from his upcoming September release - his first studio album in 11 years.

Seger, the legendary rocker from Michigan who entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, is considering releasing his classic 1976 album "Night Moves," but wants to make it so it only can be downloaded as an album, Andrews said.

"It's amazing how many people go there," Andrews said of iTunes. "We're hoping albums work there." Andrews said he wasn't sure if Apple eventually would allow the album to be kept intact.

An Apple spokesman declined comment.

But bands can no longer risk losing out on sales and marketing generated from the digital formats, especially on iTunes, said Phil Leigh, an analyst with Inside Digital Media, a market research firm. With CD sales continuing to drop, it's only a matter of time until the last holdouts give up, he said.

"Any artist that doesn't is going to be left at the station," Leigh said. "It's not a secret that growth in the CD market is as dead as General Custer."

The popularity of iPods already has made Apple's iTunes the dominant way of legally downloading music. The three-year-old store has already sold more than a billion songs.

Because songs downloaded at Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Music, Napster and other sites won't work on Apple's 58 million iPods, iTunes holds about 70 percent of the legal downloading market.

Metallica, who helped lead the charge to shut down the old Napster in 2000, finally gave in late last month and released their songs on iTunes, including several unreleased live tracks.

"Over the last year or so, we have seen an ever-growing number of Metallica fans using online sites such as iTunes to get their music. ... Fire up your iTunes, your iPods and whatever else you've got, like we do, and enjoy iMetallica," the band wrote on its Web site.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers joined iTunes in April with the launch of "Stadium Arcadium," their first album in three years. The band presold tickets for its tour and gave bonus content to fans who preordered the album. This month, Bob Dylan also used the site to presell concert tickets.

Record labels say they're working with their bands to embrace all possible formats, including online music stores.

"It's undeniably clear that fans go online to keep up with artists," said Jeanne Meyer, spokeswoman for EMI North America, which has represented the Rolling Stones and Beastie Boys among other bands as they made successful leaps online. "So it follows that there is a fairly big demand for buying music legitimately online."

The growth of online distribution should help stabilize the industry, particularly as more devices such as cell phones are able to play songs bought online, said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with NPD Group Inc., a marketing research firm.

For musicians, it's another way to resell their entire catalogs to fans who want the songs in multiple formats, he said.

Still, online holdouts remain.

The Beatles, who were one of the last bands to embrace CDs, haven't allowed any online service to sell their music. Solo songs from John Lennon, for instance, are not on iTunes but available on MSN Music and other sites.

The band's Apple Corps, the guardian of the group's commercial interests, has been locked in various lawsuits for years with Apple Computer over the use of the Apple logo. In May, a London judge ruled Apple is entitled to use the logo on iTunes. Apple Corps argued the computer maker had broken a 1991 agreement in which each side agreed not to enter into the other's field of business.

London-based Apple Corps did not respond to interview requests.

Led Zeppelin songs aren't at the sites, but some solo material from Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are available at iTunes and other online stores. A spokeswoman from Warner Music Group declined comment.

Radiohead songs can't be downloaded either, but lead singer Thom Yorke's new album "Eraser" is available. A publicist said the band didn't respond to interview requests.

Garth Brooks left Capitol Records in 2005 and then inked a deal with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to sell his material. The country singer hasn't allowed his songs to be legally downloaded at any major stores including Wal-Mart's service, where songs are sold for 88 cents. Brooks' manager, Bob Doyle, did not return calls.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-19-15-13-26





Fired or Quit, Tom Cruise Parts Ways With Studio
David M. Halbfinger and Geraldine Fabrikant

Citing Tom Cruise’s yearlong metamorphosis from pure box-office phenomenon to pop-culture punch line, Viacom’s chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, said Tuesday that Paramount Pictures was ending its 14-year relationship with the actor’s production company.

Mr. Cruise’s representatives insisted that they had not been fired but instead had quit and had already lined up $100 million in financing to produce movies on their own.

Either way, the parting of the ways was anything but amicable. And it came as the latest sign that the media conglomerates that control Hollywood are growing impatient with the megastars who earn the highest salaries.

Last year, Mr. Cruise seemed to sprout cracks in his megawatt-smile facade: jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch to declare his love for the actress Katie Holmes; assailing Brooke Shields for taking prescription drugs to treat postpartum depression; and speaking out publicly against psychiatry and for his religion, Scientology.

Mr. Cruise’s third installment of the “Mission: Impossible” series has earned nearly $400 million worldwide and could earn half again that much from DVD sales. But its weak opening weekend in May left Paramount executives believing that the negative attention and mockery of Mr. Cruise had hurt the film. Worse still, Mr. Cruise’s rich chunk of the profits could leave the studio barely breaking even.

After weeks of negotiations to extend a production deal, Mr. Redstone said Tuesday that Paramount had given up.

“As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal,” Mr. Redstone told The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the studio’s decision on its Web site. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.”

One person who had been briefed by Viacom executives said the studio did not want to renew the contract for a production deal that had been reported to cost as much as $10 million a year. “It was a huge reduction in the size,” according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The issue was the cost of his overhead and his executives. All the studios are getting out of these kinds of relationships.”

But Paula Wagner, Mr. Cruise’s partner in Cruise-Wagner Productions, said in an interview Tuesday that she and Mr. Cruise had, sometime “in the last few days,” told their agents at Creative Artists Agency to inform Paramount that they were terminating the contract talks.

Ms. Wagner said that she and Mr. Cruise had already obtained commitments from two hedge funds, one in New York and one in Los Angeles, for $100 million in revolving credit to make movies, and that they had begun looking for a new distribution deal.

“This is something we’ve dreamt of, to have an independently financed production company, where we can decide the films that we make, from high-concept to more personal pictures,” she said. “I think we’re in the forefront of a trend.”

As for Mr. Redstone’s allusion to Mr. Cruise’s conduct, Ms. Wagner fired back, “I have no answer for a stupid statement.” She speculated that Mr. Redstone was “trying to save face,” having learned from Wall Street chatter of Mr. Cruise’s hunt for alternative financing.

A spokesman for Mr. Redstone, Carl Folta, scoffed at Ms. Wagner’s talk of new financial backers. “Did they give you a name?” he said.

About Mr. Cruise, Mr. Folta said, “It’s a business decision, and it’s based on his behavior.”

Ms. Wagner said through a spokesman that the hedge funds’ names would be announced soon.

It is still unclear how Mr. Cruise’s agency, Creative Artists, will respond to Paramount’s public slap at one of America’s most visible stars. The agency is the most powerful in Hollywood, and a decade ago a studio would have risked war by publicly denigrating a client like Mr. Cruise.

Rick Nicita, Mr. Cruise’s agent — and Ms. Wagner’s husband — did not respond to a call for comment. A spokesman for Creative Artists did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Eric Weissmann, a Hollywood lawyer since the 1950’s, said that what was most surprising about the Paramount-Cruise split was that the studio could simply have decided not to renew the contract. “They don’t have to give a reason, and to go public is highly unusual,” he said. “This is not a way to get Tom Cruise to cut his fee down. This is cutting the ties.”

While Paramount’s decision was a shock to the Hollywood status quo, the way in which it was revealed was another sign that movie studios are playing rougher with stars they once coddled, one senior movie studio executive said.

Most recently, ABC canceled a production deal with Mel Gibson’s company for a mini-series about the Holocaust after he made anti-Semitic statements while detained for drunk driving. And the head of Morgan Creek Productions wrote a scathing letter scolding the actress Lindsay Lohan for unruly behavior during a movie shoot; the letter was quickly leaked to the news media.

“I think the press has become the weapon of choice for these people,” said the studio executive. “These companies are sick of being pushed around. This is indicative of a huge paradigm shift in the industry in terms of what constitutes a star and how much power a star has.”

David M. Halbfinger reported from Los Angeles for this article and Geraldine Fabrikant from New York.Allison Hope Weiner contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/bu...rtner=homepage





Allies Start to Escalate Dispute Between Cruise and Viacom
David M. Halbfinger

This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Geraldine Fabrikant and Sharon Waxman and written by Mr. Halbfinger.

A day after Viacom’s chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, abruptly evicted Tom Cruise from his longstanding home on the Paramount movie lot, the war of words between the actor’s camp and Mr. Redstone and his allies was on the verge of escalating Wednesday from recrimination to retribution.

Mr. Cruise’s representatives at Creative Artists Agency — the leading talent shop in Hollywood, with a roster of actors, directors and writers so vast that it is nearly impossible for a studio to function without its cooperation — signaled that they would be loath to do more business with Paramount if Mr. Redstone continued to call the shots from on high.

“Paramount has no credibility right now,” Richard Lovett, the agency’s seldom-quoted president, said by telephone from a family vacation in Hawaii. “It is not clear who is running the studio and who is making the decisions.”

That warning came after Mr. Redstone, Viacom’s 83-year-old chieftain, declared on Tuesday that his movie unit was severing ties with Mr. Cruise’s production company after 14 years because the actor’s erratic behavior over the last year was “not acceptable to Paramount.”

Mr. Cruise and Paramount have collaborated on movies that have earned box-office receipts of more than $2.5 billion.

Normally, such studio announcements would come from Brad Grey, chairman of Paramount, or perhaps Thomas E. Freston, Viacom’s chief executive. For such talk to come out of the blue, from Mr. Redstone himself, and then be followed by two days of silence from both Mr. Grey and Mr. Freston, stunned Hollywood’s power elite even more than the copious mud-slinging.

And on Wednesday, the mud became toxic.

Mr. Cruise’s formidable lawyer, Bert Fields, fired back at Mr. Redstone, calling his comments “disgusting” and suggesting that “he’s lost it completely, or he’s been given breathtakingly bad advice.”

Mr. Fields, speaking from vacation in France, added, “That a mogul like Sumner Redstone could make a statement so vicious, so pompous, so petulant as that he didn’t want to make a deal with Tom Cruise because of his personal conduct — it tells you more about Sumner Redstone and Viacom, than about Tom Cruise.”

Mr. Fields may have been speaking as Mr. Cruise’s advocate, but his comments were reflected in conversations with executives, producers and talent agents around Hollywood on Wednesday.

While the industry insiders did not take issue with Mr. Redstone’s prerogative to end a production deal, they declared themselves flabbergasted at the manner in which he did it, although few would speak on the record, since they were not directly involved in the dispute.

Some questioned whether Mr. Redstone was trying to protect his executives from being the bearer of bad tidings. But many wondered why Mr. Redstone would single out Mr. Cruise’s odd behavior from a year ago, during the publicity tour for “War of the Worlds,” as a reason for ending a business relationship now.

One executive pointed out that Paramount had given a green light to “Mission: Impossible III” after Mr. Cruise had repeatedly jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s couch on television, and criticized psychiatric drugs to Matt Lauer on the “Today” show.

Mr. Cruise’s producing partner, Paula Wagner, asserted that Mr. Redstone’s swipe at Mr. Cruise had put both Mr. Grey and Mr. Freston in a “lose-lose” situation.

“If you didn’t know anything about this, how effective are you at running a studio?” she said of the two executives. “Would anyone want to work with management that’s ineffectual? And if you’re complicit in it, would anyone work with a studio that devours its own?”

Mr. Redstone, in his own defense, said in an interview that although he liked Mr. Fields, “his opinion is in the minority,” and that he had taken congratulatory calls from investors and such Hollywood luminaries as David Geffen and the producer Brian Grazer. “Dominick Dunne called me to say that I behaved like Samuel Goldwyn,” he said, referring to the famed producer and studio mogul.

And his friend Alan C. Greenberg — the chairman of the executive committee at Bear Stearns, the Wall Street firm, and a longtime Viacom board member — spoke out in support of Mr. Redstone.

“Tom Cruise has gone nuts,” Mr. Greenberg said. If Hollywood people believe that Mr. Redstone handled Mr. Cruise badly, he added, “They are entitled to their opinion.’’

“He did the right thing. The guy diminished his drawing power.”

Asked how he thought Paramount’s divorce from Mr. Cruise would affect Viacom, Mr. Greenberg said: “Positively.”

Yesterday at least, Mr. Greenberg was right. Viacom’s stock rose 21 cents, to close at $36.66.

But what the breakup with Mr. Cruise signals for the future of Viacom’s management is less clear.

According to two executives close to the company, who insisted on anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their relationships in the industry, Mr. Freston and Mr. Grey told top-level Viacom leaders in mid-July that they were not renewing Mr. Cruise’s deal and that they were unhappy with his value as a star.

Still, executives involved in the negotiations confirmed that the studio had recently offered Mr. Cruise a $2 million deal — a reduction from the previous deal of $4 million in overhead and a $6 million fund for developing movie projects.

Mr. Fields, too, confirmed that Paramount executives came to him with an offer to renew Mr. Cruise’s deal about three weeks ago. He said Mr. Cruise decided not to accept it, but before he could deliver this decision to Paramount, Mr. Redstone made his comment to The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Redstone, for his part, was impatient for his executives to conclude the discussions, people familiar with the talks said. According to Viacom executives and others close to the film unit, Mr. Redstone was irritated that Mr. Cruise stood to make upward of $75 million on “Mission: Impossible III,” a movie that has taken in close to $400 million in worldwide box office, although it fell below expectations. Mr. Cruise had a deal that gave him about 25 percent of the studio’s gross revenue on the movie.

Paramount and Viacom executives said that neither Mr. Freston nor Mr. Grey knew that Mr. Redstone was going to attack Mr. Cruise and that both disagreed with the tenor of their boss’s comments.

Neither Mr. Grey, Mr. Freston, nor even the studio’s public relations executives would issue any statement — a rare circumstance in such a high-profile imbroglio.

Their silence left it to many in Hollywood who do business with Paramount to ask whether Mr. Grey, who became the studio boss in January 2005 and has presided over a turbulent era of headline-grabbing firings, was really in charge after all.

One producer who has worked with the studio said: “They still don’t have it together, that’s the message. Paramount is still un-together. It’s not that tricky to do this.” He added: “Every time they have a short run of calm, they inevitably step in it.”

Mr. Fields, who has counted Mr. Grey among his clients in the past, echoed that jab at the studio chairman. “I have great faith in Brad Grey, but he obviously ain’t running the place,” Mr. Fields said.

As for Mr. Freston, who built MTV into a cable powerhouse but has been judged harshly by Wall Street as Viacom’s stock has languished, there was some debate in the industry over whether the handling of Mr. Cruise’s termination had caused friction between Mr. Freston and his boss. But Mr. Redstone, who controls Viacom with 74 percent of the votes, said firmly that there was no wedge between him and his chief executive.

Mr. Redstone added that he believed he had “struck a blow for the entire industry” in chastising Mr. Cruise. “It is about time that the industry started dealing with these stars in a different manner and let them know that they are not going to get big money and act in a way that is inappropriate and embarrasses the studios,” he said.

Mr. Cruise remained silent for a second day. Ms. Wagner, his producing partner, said their company was pursuing its plans for an equity- financing deal with a pair of hedge funds for $100 million in credit. But Mr. Fields said he was unaware of those plans.

“I don’t think Tom has raised $100 million in a hedge fund,” he said. “And I know nothing about any such thing. I think that’s just talk.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/bu.../24cruise.html





Caught on Film: A Growing Unease in Hollywood
Laura M. Holson

For many here, Stacey Snider was the Hollywood executive who had it all. As chairwoman of Universal Pictures, she hobnobbed with celebrities at the Academy Awards. She was feted at charity events as well as in the fashion pages of Vogue. But after General Electric acquired Universal Pictures in 2004, the bright lights lost their brilliance.

Films like the Peter Jackson “King Kong” were considered disappointments, despite bringing in $547 million at the worldwide box office. And like many of her industry peers facing similar oversight, she regarded the scrutiny of the studio’s quarterly returns as, at times, oppressive. So much so that Ms. Snider quit her job in February to become chief executive of DreamWorks, now a division of Paramount Pictures, to work with the director Steven Spielberg on far fewer projects.

“It’s not like I view this as a private, artistic enterprise,” Ms. Snider, 45, said in a recent telephone interview. Still, she said: “I certainly felt the pressure. I felt the uncertainty. It galvanized the angst. We went from making movies to making product and content. I didn’t want to make franchises. I wanted to make movies.”

Hers is a common refrain in Hollywood these days. Despite a domestic box-office surge after years of declining attendance, 2006 is shaping up to be a time of Hollywood discontent. Studio executives have waged war on actor salaries, as high-profile projects with stars like Jim Carrey have been put off. Movie production deals, like the one Tom Cruise has at Paramount, are being renegotiated. Studios are also making fewer big-budget movies.

But while Hollywood has undergone periodic shifts like this before, many people here agree that there is something different this time, a permanence to Hollywood’s new austerity plan. Executives are facing too many unknowns, among them, changing moviegoer habits, rising costs and the threat of piracy.

“In this Wall Street and corporate world, the discussion has become: What is the proven, unique selling property of this product?” said Warren Beatty, the actor, who is upbeat about the industry’s prospects.

But he, too, agreed the industry was in transition. “The problem is you can’t sell entertainment the way you sell cars or air-conditioners,’’ he said. “Entertainment is dependent, to some extent, on surprise.”

The concern so far seems largely psychological, although many here predict dark days ahead. Movie-making is no longer a growth business, and has lost its luster among investors. Even the most well-run large movie studios often return only 5 percent to 7 percent annually. And other forms of entertainment — the Internet, sports and video games — are fiercely competing for consumers’ attention.

“When you hear what people are afraid of, it’s that movies are not special anymore,” said Terry Press, who runs worldwide marketing at DreamWorks Animation. “It’s the single issue no wants to think about or say out loud.”

The tipping point, many here agree, was Walt Disney’s announcement last month that it would eliminate 650 jobs in its movie division, fire its production chief and sharply reduce the number of films it makes to a dozen or so a year from as many as 20.

What’s more, the company said it would focus mostly on Disney-branded films like the popular “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, which it can exploit across all divisions.

“Where Disney may have sent ripples, it begged the question, Who knows what others will do?” said Leonard Goldberg, the movie producer and former business partner of Aaron Spelling who was known for television shows like “Charlie’s Angels” and “Fantasy Island.”

Slow-growing movie studios are wilting under Wall Street’s demands to deliver a box-office hit like the “X-Men” series or “Pirates” every time out. Executives say the decline in DVD sales, which began in early 2005, is taking a toll on budgets. And to complicate matters, studios have not figured out a money-making digital strategy to deflect piracy while, at the same time, appeasing fickle consumers who want movies online.

“Stress is a function of fear,” said Alan F. Horn, who has been in the movie business three decades and is president of Warner Brothers. While he says he is optimistic about the future, he conceded that running a studio “has never been tougher.”

Warner has had one of its worst summers in years, with disappointments like “Lady in the Water” by M. Night Shyamalan, the big-budget remake of “The Poseidon Adventure” and the animated “Ant Bully.” But even profitable Warner movies are cause for anxiety because Hollywood is quick to label anything a loser that does not meet prerelease expectations.

For example, “Superman Returns” by Warner cost $209 million to make and Mr. Horn predicted it would garner $400 million at the worldwide box office (a respectable sum), which he said ensured a profit after DVD and television sales. But many in Hollywood expected it to bring in at least $500 million given Superman’s popularity and the publicity around the movie’s release. Mr. Horn said, “People are asking, ‘Are you disappointed?’ I don’t know how to relate to that. I don’t know what to say.”

There are few economic indicators that reflect Hollywood’s apparent unease. Art dealers who cater to studio executives, actors and producers said buying had not slowed. Nor have sales of homes that cost $5 million to $10 million, several real estate agents said. And despite layoffs at all the major studios, the number of film and television production jobs has increased.

In the first six months of 2006, 130,000 people were employed in entertainment in Los Angeles, compared with 127,200 in 2005, according to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation. That growth is being fueled largely by an explosion in independent film production. Jack Kyser, the group’s chief economist, said 23 of the 30 films being made here in mid-August were from independent production companies.

But those statistics reflect only part of the story.

Robert Shaye, the founder of New Line Cinema, a division of Time Warner that will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year, said a fundamental driver of Hollywood’s unease was the high cost of making and marketing films. (The average in 2005 was $96 million.) Investment funds have poured money into movies, reducing the sting of studio cost-cutting. But investment funds are not immune to losses, either. A newcomer, Legendary Pictures, invested in “Lady in The Water” and “The Ant Bully,” Studios are also under attack from digital pirates who distribute illegal copies online. As a result of the piracy, studio executives can no longer depend on waves of re-releases for steady income. “Once it’s out there, it’s out there,” Mr. Shaye said.

With digital pirates and the pressure from Wall Street to produce predictable profits, the dialogue about what movies are made and marketed was bound to change.

If there is fear among some in Hollywood that brand managers are taking over, it is because two studios recently filled top creative jobs with executives whose expertise is movie marketing. At Disney, Nina Jacobson, the well-respected president of production, was fired and succeeded by Oren Aviv, the marketing chief. Ms. Snider, who joined DreamWorks, was succeeded in March by two executives, including Universal’s top movie marketer, Marc Shmuger.

Tom Staggs, Disney’s chief financial officer, argues that the concerns are unfounded. “The suits aren’t running the studio,” he said. “I think Hollywood has to constantly challenge itself to remain relevant.” Still, he added: “If we let it become a cookie-cutter, brand-flapping exercise, it is not going to work. We have to focus on the creative side.”

Some promising young executives are seeking to pursue creativity outside the studio. Last year, Mary Parent, 39, and Scott Stuber, 37, set in motion an option in their contract that allowed them to quit their jobs as presidents of production at Universal Pictures to become producers. Both said they did not leave the studio because they were unhappy; their producing deal is at Universal. Instead, they wanted the opportunity to flex their creative might before they got too old or started families.

“It reaches a point where it is hard to enjoy it,” said Ms. Parent, reflecting on being a studio executive. “Just the sheer volume of meetings between phone calls. You are trying to cut through the tide. It was grueling. You were at a test screening every night until midnight; you have scripts to read. You don’t want to be that person just scratching the surface.”

Of course, being a producer, particularly a new one, is no less demanding. In the last year, Ms. Parent has made five weeklong trips to New Zealand where she is a producer for the film “Halo.” Mr. Stuber has spent much of the summer in Arizona on the set of “The Kingdom,” where temperatures have spiked to as much as 110 degrees. “It’s not like it’s less busy,” Mr. Stuber said. “But you get to spend three hours in an editing room if you want to. You can’t lose sight of the fact that the job is to entertain.”

Whatever the challenges ahead, Mr. Goldberg, the producer, said Hollywood would adapt as it did when silent movies became talkies, and three decades ago, when the VCR was perceived as a threat.

He had no sympathy for those who do nothing but complain. “Let them get a real job,” he said. “They get paid a lot. They go to great parties. They fly around in jets, not only for business reasons, but for personal things, too. I think there are worse jobs to have.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/bu...hollywood.html





Fresh Princes of Mumbai, Building a Global Audience
Laura M. Holson

When you are Will Smith, there are few places you can’t get in. Last year, one of those places was China.

Government censors allowed only 20 foreign movie imports in 2005, leaving out Mr. Smith’s romantic comedy “Hitch.” The rejection rankled the actor; China is one of the fastest-growing movie markets. So at a gathering of the Sony Corporation’s top management in January, Mr. Smith appealed to the chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer, and a studio executive, Michael Lynton, to introduce him to Chinese producing partners.

“We can be more helpful in India,” Mr. Lynton told Mr. Smith at their afternoon meeting at the Kahala Resort in Honolulu. India has a robust movie industry with none of China’s political constraints. Mr. Lynton offered to introduce the actor to Indian producers, actors and directors. And the next month Mr. Smith took his first trip to India.

Now he has a deal — to make movies there instead.

Overbrook Entertainment, the company created by Mr. Smith and his business partner, James Lassiter, announced it was working with UTV, a television and film concern run by the entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala. The two have agreed to produce two movies, neither of which will star the popular Mr. Smith.

UTV will pay the films’ costs up to a specified sum (after that amount, Overbrook has to raise the money) but the burden is on Mr. Smith and Mr. Lassiter to develop a script and hire the cast.

The deal says a lot about Hollywood’s desire to court foreign audiences. After years of declining movie attendance at home, studios and movie stars are looking for new opportunities.

Last week, for instance, Hugh Jackman made an arrangement with 20th Century Fox to produce as many as five films a year in his native Australia. Quentin Tarantino, a fan of Chinese martial arts movies, has marketed Asian-language films in the United States under the banner “presented by Quentin Tarantino.”

But it says even more about Mr. Smith’s ambition to become an international player. “It’s been said, ‘Why sell something to 10 people when you can sell it to 10 million people?’ ” said Mr. Smith late one afternoon in an interview in Overbrook’s offices in Beverly Hills. “You have to have a global perspective.”

Early on, Mr. Smith, 37, sought an international career. Born and reared in Philadelphia, he got his start in the mid-1980’s rapping in local clubs as half of the rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Then the teenage rapper met Mr. Lassiter, who was attending Temple University and was a friend of Jazzy Jeff, whose real name is Jeffrey Townes.

One day Mr. Smith asked Mr. Lassiter, now 41, if he would allow a record company in New York to send a contract to Mr. Lassiter’s fax machine at his home. (This is how Mr. Lassiter got into show business: he owned the only fax machine among his neighborhood friends.) Mr. Lassiter reviewed the contract, and within weeks he was Mr. Smith’s road manager.

“We saw beyond Philadelphia and had the opportunity to travel the world and have someone else pay for it,” said Mr. Lassiter. “At first it was selfish, but it turned into a business.”

While the two friends have guided Mr. Smith’s career together for nearly two decades, they are a study in contrasts. At an interview, Mr. Lassiter wore a plain white shirt and tan pants, while Mr. Smith was dapper in a lime-green corduroy jacket. Mr. Lassiter is reserved, where Mr. Smith greeted a stranger with a hug. And Mr. Lassiter balked at sitting on a pomegranate-colored couch for a photograph, saying it was too flashy.

“Come on,” countered Mr. Smith, smiling. “I like it. What do you guys think?” he said, addressing onlookers standing at the back of Overbrook’s conference room.

Indeed the two interact with an ease rare in Hollywood. “We have a very interesting yin and yang balance where I don’t have to burden myself,” Mr. Smith earnestly said. “I can let my mind go a thousand miles an hour, where it should be. It’s up to him to align our energy and make sure that the ideas will work.”

Mr. Lassiter, who had just arrived from New York, offered a blunt response to Mr. Smith’s remarks. “I can’t believe I got up at 4:30 a.m. for this,” he said, rolling his eyes at Mr. Smith and laughing.

In 1986 the two traveled to London to make an album. It was their first time in Europe together, and the trip made a deep impression on Mr. Smith.

“We met a group of girls who went to Syracuse University who were going to school there,” said Mr. Smith. “That was bizarre to me. To see how free they were. They met there. That world perspective opened me up to the idea. I realized how secluded Americans are.”

Four years later Mr. Smith joined the television sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” in which he starred from 1990 to 1996. Mr. Smith endeared himself to “Fresh Prince” fans in Spain by conducting interviews in Spanish. But he still remained in awe of the impact rap music had on foreign cultures. He recalled a visit to Tokyo in 1988 by the group Run DMC who were greeted by 5,000 fans at the airport wearing gold chains and track suits.

More recently, in 2000, Mr. Smith and Mr. Lassiter were in Mozambique where Mr. Smith was making the movie “Ali.” “One guy we hired for the movie, all he wanted to talk about was Tupac and Redman,” said Mr. Lassiter, referring to the slain rapper Tupac Shakur and the rapper and actor Reggie Noble, who performs under the name Redman.

On the same trip, Mr. Smith said he saw a woman in a village one afternoon washing her clothes in a river. She spoke no English. But as Mr. Smith walked by, she pointed and shouted, “Gettin’ jiggy wit it!” a popular line from one Mr. Smith’s songs.

“I was cracking up,” said Mr. Smith, his body shaking with laughter at the memory. “If she would have said, ‘You’re Will Smith,’ that would have been one thing. But she knew the song. She had to have seen the video to recognize me. And she probably didn’t have a TV.”

Even now the two are perplexed at actors who complain about traveling overseas. “They say they hate the food in London,” said Mr. Lassiter, sounding annoyed.

“How can you hate the food?” said Mr. Smith, laughing.

“I mean, they could go to Nobu or Mr. Chow,” added Mr. Lassiter.

In 1998, after brief stints at other companies, Mr. Lassiter became Mr. Smith’s business partner and the two formed Overbrook, which produced a hit in “Hitch,” but missed with this year’s “ATL.” Originally, Overbrook had a deal with Universal Pictures to produce movies. But after three years and no movies, Mr. Smith took his company to Sony.

“There was a learning curve” at Universal, conceded Mr. Lassiter. “The management changed. We were a little arrogant. It takes time to read the scripts and get to know the directors. We weren’t ready.”

“I was ready,” countered Mr. Smith, but he did acknowledge being impatient.

If there was a turning point in Mr. Smith’s foreign appeal, it was in 1995 with the movie “Bad Boys.” Mr. Smith said the producers expected the film would make only about $5 million overseas.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Lassiter said they persuaded its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, to let Mr. Smith go to the Cannes Film Festival to promote it; holding a news conference, throwing an MTV party attended by 1,000 people and conducting scores of one-on-one interviews with journalists. “It started out as two days and it ended up being two weeks,” said Mr. Lassiter.

The movie brought in 15 times as much at the international box office as was predicted. Since then, Mr. Smith and Mr. Lassiter pick out a new foreign market to concentrate on with the release of each movie. For “I, Robot” it was Russia; in South Africa it was “Ali.”

India now is the country they most want to explore. Already the two have met with Indian directors and actors. And they hope to announce their first movie soon, which Sony has the right to distribute worldwide.

“We don’t want to plaster Mumbai with pictures of Will Smith,” said Mr. Lassiter. “We want to make an exchange. We want to do films there as well as introduce Indian actors and directors to the United States. We have to show people we are willing to adapt to their world.”

But they acknowledge that this endeavor is risky. India’s close-knit film community is already well established. And the most popular movies are Bollywood musicals, a genre in which neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Lassiter has any experience. As a result, their live-action movie produced with UTV could be filmed outside of India. The other film will be made in India where UTV has animation operations.

“A lot of the people in India don’t know what they have,” said Mr. Smith.

Neither do Americans, he said. A case in point, he said, is the story of the Taj Mahal. It was built as a tomb in 1631 for Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved wife of Emperor Shah Jahan who died after having the couple’s 14th child. “But there is a second part of the story you don’t know,” said Mr. Smith, recounting the history.

Shah Jahan, who was said to have killed his brothers, was later overthrown by his son. The emperor was imprisoned in a tower where the view from his window was of the tomb he had built to honor his wife.

“No one hears that part,” said Mr. Smith. “What are the other stories we don’t know?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/bu...a/21smith.html





Rap Producer Ready to Try Again With Old Partner
Jeff Leeds

In December, Irving Lorenzo had reason to think that the tumult that had sidetracked his wildly successful career as a rap entrepreneur had finally passed.

After a three-year federal inquiry, a jury acquitted Mr. Lorenzo of charges that he used his rap label, Murder Inc., to launder money for a convicted drug kingpin. Now Mr. Lorenzo, known professionally as Irv Gotti, was free to produce hits for any company in the business.

Almost nine months later, however, Mr. Lorenzo, 36, has found the road back full of twists, none more unexpected than his choice of partners: the same record conglomerate that severed its ties with him during the investigation and, as Mr. Lorenzo said at the time, “made a decision to destroy me.”

He was expected to sign a deal early this week that would put him back in business with Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record corporation, which had financed Murder Inc. and distributed its recordings. The deal would make him the chief of a new profit-sharing venture with the company’s Universal/Motown label.

“It feels exhilarating,” Mr. Lorenzo said in an interview. “It’s like a rebirth. It feels like God put me through hell, showed me a lot of things, showed me who the good people and bad people are around me, and lined me up to do what I’m put here to do.”
Under the three-year deal Universal will commit roughly $10 million to Mr. Lorenzo in an advance against future profits and payments to cover overhead, said people briefed on the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The deal also includes a provision that could allow Mr. Lorenzo to buy ownership of Murder Inc.’s master recordings, these people said.

Mr. Lorenzo returns with a roster that includes Murder Inc.’s signature acts: the rapper Ja Rule and the R&B singer Ashanti. He has also been working to resolve a contract dispute with another R&B vocalist, Lloyd. Mr. Lorenzo has been eyeing artists in other genres, and has been in talks to sign the pop-oriented singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton, who had a hit in 2002 on another Universal label.

Even with the new pact, it may prove difficult for Mr. Lorenzo to return to the platinum-selling pinnacles he reached a few years ago. Ja Rule and Ashanti have had lackluster sales with their last few albums, although Mr. Lorenzo said that was largely because of an overall decline in the music market.

While unaccustomed to the role of underdog, he said he was not concerned about competition.

“I embrace competition, because I get busy,” he said. “Certain of my peers in the business, I know that they don’t want me to succeed. They prayed for me to go to jail.”

In the early days of 2003 that seemed a distinct possibility. Federal agents raided Murder Inc.’s offices and seized bank accounts connected to the label. Investigators alleged that Mr. Lorenzo had used the label to launder drug money for a convicted dealer, Kenneth McGriff, whose gang dominated the crack trade in Jamaica, Queens, in the 1980’s.

Mr. Lorenzo denied that he had laundered money for Mr. McGriff. Instead, he said, he had legally negotiated a deal for Def Jam to put up $500,000 to co-produce a soundtrack for “Crime Partners,” a McGriff-produced film.

But even as Mr. Lorenzo proclaimed his innocence, Universal began turning a cold shoulder, he said. Universal pressed Murder Inc. to vacate its Manhattan offices, citing complaints from other tenants in the building, and certain high-ranking executives would no longer take his calls, Mr. Lorenzo said.

After Mr. Lorenzo and his brother, Christopher, were indicted in early 2005, the relationship with Universal foundered. Universal tightened its purse strings, and within months it moved to end its partnership with Mr. Lorenzo.

But then, he had his day in court — and won.

Within days of his acquittal, he was meeting with prospective partners that could help finance his label’s revival. Many expected him to sign with Warner Music Group, whose executive ranks are filled with Mr. Lorenzo’s former associates from Def Jam, the Universal label that marketed and promoted Murder Inc. releases.

Mr. Lorenzo said he and Lyor Cohen, who heads Warner’s American arm and previously ran Def Jam, had discussed the possibility of Mr. Lorenzo switching to the Warner fold even before Mr. Lorenzo’s indictment. “I made that man a lot of money,” Mr. Lorenzo said of Mr. Cohen. But Warner’s offer, Mr. Lorenzo said, was so low that he found it “extremely disrespectful.”

Around the same time Universal’s chairman, Doug Morris, decided he was not ready to let Mr. Lorenzo leave the fold. For their part Universal executives said the legal proceedings enveloping Mr. Lorenzo had forced their hand when they parted ways with Murder Inc.

Mr. Lorenzo, still resentful of the company’s treatment, was skeptical. But, he said, he was persuaded by Universal’s president, Zach Horowitz (the only senior executive who had kept in touch with him), to attend a lunch with him and Mr. Morris. Mr. Lorenzo and his business lawyer, Ron Sweeney, met with them at a restaurant in Santa Monica, and each side vented. Mr. Morris noted that Universal’s move to break from Murder Inc. arose from Mr. Lorenzo’s decisions to conduct business with Mr. McGriff. And Mr. Lorenzo said certain executives should have been more supportive personally even if Universal had to distance itself.

Mr. Morris said Mr. Lorenzo “really felt betrayed, and I don’t blame him.” But Mr. Morris said: “I never had any bad feelings toward him. It wasn’t anything to do about him. He’s one of the most talented people in the industry.”

Mr. Lorenzo’s representatives had been seeking outside investors who could help him start a label on his own, allowing him to keep the profits instead of sharing them with a big music company. Within weeks of his acquittal, he was introduced to Larry Goldfarb, a hedge fund investor from the San Francisco area, who expressed interest in such an arrangement. Mr. Goldfarb accompanied Mr. Lorenzo on the Grammy party circuit in February.

Soon the two worked out a deal in which Mr. Goldfarb had agreed to invest as much as $30 million to finance Mr. Lorenzo’s label, one of the biggest such investments in years. But weeks later Mr. Goldfarb, apparently uncertain about his potential return, abruptly bailed out of the arrangement.

Mr. Lorenzo had to start from scratch, working out a revised agreement with Universal. While the new structure means he will have to share more of the profits than if he owned the label himself, he said he was content to be back in business without a legal cloud overhead. Still, he acknowledged that it would not be so simple to rule the charts after his legal woes kept him “on ice for three years.”

But he added: “Our story is not finished yet. After this next three years, if I don’t win, and I’m not successful, that was the right ending to the story. But what happens if I win? I like my chances.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/ar...FZvMOqd0RouJbQ





The (Tinsel) Town That Ate Superman
Kristopher Tapley

JUNE 16, 1959, the day the actor George Reeves died, hardly ranks with the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John F. Kennedy when it comes to defining moments in American history. But the date has retained curious power for more than a few people who experienced the demised of television’s Superman as a loss of innocence.

Some remember where they were when they heard that Reeves had been found dead in his Beverly Hills home, an apparent suicide. Lore surrounding the event quickly blossomed into a mystery that seems wholly out of keeping with the modest house — still standing at 1579 Benedict Canyon Drive — where Reeves spent his final moments.

The death was declared a suicide by the police. But Reeves’s mother, Helen Bessolo, refused to believe that her son had ended his own life. She went so far as to hold his body in a temporary burial vault for nearly eight months, waiting for further evidence from a private investigator, Jerry Geisler.

Mrs. Bessolo and Mr. Geisler died before they could prove anything. But theories summarized in deeply researched books like “Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady and the Death of Superman” by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger and “Speeding Bullet: The Life and Bizarre Death of George Reeves” by Jan Alan Henderson continue to fuel the debate.

Was Reeves killed, as some have speculated, by his wild-child fiancée Lenore Lemmon? Or did the MGM public relations director and studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix, with his ties to organized crime, have a hand in it? Or was the culprit — if there was one — actually Mr. Mannix’s wife, Toni, with whom Reeves had a lengthy affair? With these suspects long since dead, the case may never be resolved. But it has become the stuff of a movie, “Hollywoodland,” which can at least close the loop by returning to the big screen an actor who had roles in “Gone With the Wind” and “From Here to Eternity” but would largely be remembered as the Man of Steel on television’s “Adventures of Superman.”

Set for release by Focus Features on Sept. 8, “Hollywoodland” stars Ben Affleck as Reeves and Adrien Brody as a detective investigating his death. Jim Beaver, who plays Whitney Ellsworth on the HBO series “Deadwood,” served as technical advisor. Mr. Beaver has spent decades researching Reeves’s life and death and plans to publish a book revealing his findings.

The film’s director, Allen Coulter, best known for his work on television series including “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The X-Files,” was fascinated less with Reeves than with the transition he represented.

“You sort of see the end of one world and the beginning of another,” Mr. Coulter said in a July interview at the Hotel Bel-Air here. “I think it was a period when the world was changing from what I think of as the old world, which is represented by the old world of Hollywood in the movie, versus the new world that’s coming, that world of rock ’n’ roll, fast food, noise, the ubiquity of televisions — the modern world.”

The truth of Reeves’s death is likely to remain a mystery, but his life uncoiled in a way that Mr. Coulter could understand. “George Reeves was a big success in terms of the public, but not in terms of his mind,” he said. “Television was a new medium. It was considered to be the graveyard of failed movie careers. Those people interest me more than people who are the players. After all, most of us are not famous. Most of us are guys like us that just hope we have some successes.”

“Hollywoodland” got its start in 2001, when the producer Glenn Williamson, then head of production at USA Films (which later merged with Good Machine to form Focus) purchased Paul Bernbaum’s script, “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”

The title was changed under legal pressure from Warner Brothers, which produced the “Superman” films and was protective of its hero’s signature phrase (though it conspicuously ditched the words “American way” in its latest “Superman Returns”).

The project, meanwhile, took shape around Mr. Bernbaum’s story of a fictionalized detective in pursuit of an elusive truth. “In subtle ways the script guides the audience toward a conclusion, but there is no definitive answer,” Mr. Williamson said. “Based on the presentation of the material, you can walk away thinking anything happened.”

Having moved for a time to Miramax Films, then run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the project was taken up by the filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish, known for the dark atmospherics of their “Twin Falls Idaho” and “Northfork.” But they moved on, and the picture moved back to Focus, where Mr. Coulter and his actors joined the show.

“The Polish brothers had a very specific view,” Mr. Williamson explained. “But the real issue is, this is a very accessible story, and they’re very stylized filmmakers. It was decided that a version of the film with wider appeal would have been better served with another director.”

Mr. Brody said in a telephone interview that he saw a parallel between his screen character, the fictional investigator Louis Simo, and Reeves, both of whom are discontent with their lives.

“He had bigger plans,” Mr. Brody said of Simo. “It’s an adult role, a character dealing with a lot of things a man my age deals with. The story is ultimately about two people who wanted more than they had, more recognition, fame: things that one might assume bring happiness and fulfillment. But there are other keys to happiness than what we have planned.”

When the Polish brothers were still involved, a screen test of Kyle MacLachlan as Reeves made the rounds. But Mr. Coulter ultimately cast Mr. Affleck, despite some concern that his high profile might get in the way.

“When I learned that Ben was interested,” Mr. Coulter said, “I had to think: Is it helpful to have someone that well known or does it become a distraction? Is it hard for the audience to see George, because they are seeing Ben?”

The film refuses to draw conclusions, but pressed about what he believed to be the cause of Reeves’s death, Mr. Coulter pointed squarely toward the actor.

“When you see the photograph taken of George about a month before he died,” he said, “there’s a look in this man’s face that, even if you didn’t know his end, you would say: There is a guy full of sadness and bitterness and irony. It’s not the face of a happy man. So I want people to talk about it and conjecture, but my personal feeling is Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the correct solution. And I think the simplest solution is the man was at a dead end and could not see how to escape.”

As for the new title, Mr. Coulter is inclined to believe that Warner did him a favor by opposing the old one: “I liked it instantly, because the movie is not about Hollywood. It’s not about a place; it’s about a state of mind, and ‘Hollywoodland’ suggests a state of mind. The pursuit of stardom is not restricted to Hollywood. You could call America Hollywoodland. Everybody wants to be a star.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/movies/20tapl.html





Movie Review | 'LOL'

Logging On for Love, Tuning Out the Realities
Nathan Lee

“LOL” derives its title from the Internet slang for “laugh out loud,” but there’s nothing funny about the movie’s insight into emotional abstraction. Directed by Joe Swanberg, from a screenplay written in collaboration with his co-stars Kevin Bewersdorf and C. Mason Wells, it tells the story of three post-college Chicagoans with nervous systems so wired, their hearts have begun to atrophy.

Tim (Mr. Swanberg) eyes his laptop while making out with his girlfriend. Chris (Mr. Wells) conducts his relationship by cellphone. Their stories are peripheral to the monstrous self-involvement of Alex (Mr. Bewersdorf), whose preoccupation with a girl he meets in cyberspace sabotages his ability to connect to one who shows up, nervously flirting, in real life.

The impact of technology on social relations has received subtler analysis elsewhere (see the films of David Cronenberg), but this small-scale, microbudget indie speaks the theme with a fresh voice.

Like the films of Andrew Bujalski (“Funny Ha Ha,” “Mutual Appreciation”), who turns up here in a cameo, it skitters to the rhythms of everyday talk, building each scene from the erratic pulse of its twentysomething cast.

Authentic in texture if narrow in scope, “LOL” is a movie about the way we live — or rather about the way white, urban, heterosexual circuit boys are failing to live.

LOL

Opens today in Manhattan.

Produced, directed and edited by Joe Swanberg; written by Kevin Bewersdorf, Mr. Swanberg and C. Mason Wells; director of photography, Mr. Swanberg; music by Mr. Bewersdorf; released by Washington Square Films. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 81 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Kevin Bewersdorf (Alex), Joe Swanberg (Tim), C. Mason Wells (Chris), Tipper Newton (Walter), Brigid Reagan (Ada), Greta Gerwig (Greta) and Kate Winterich (Tessa).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/08/2...es/23swan.html





After Hype Online, ‘Snakes on a Plane’ Is Letdown at Box Office
Sharon Waxman

“Snakes on a Plane,” the wildly hyped high-concept movie, turned out to be a Web-only phenomenon this weekend, as that horror-comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson took in just $15.2 million at the box office in its opening days.

The tepid opening dashed the hopes of Hollywood and especially of New Line Cinema, which released the movie, that vigorous marketing on the Internet would be a powerful new way to propel fans into the theater at a time when movies are working hard to hold their own against other forms of entertainment.

“We’re a little disappointed,” said David Tuckerman, president for theatrical distribution for New Line. “There were a lot of inflated expectations on this picture, with the Internet buzz. But it basically performed like a normal horror movie.”

Projections within Hollywood and on Internet movie sites had predicted that the film might take in anywhere from $20 million to more than $30 million on its opening weekend.

Instead “Snakes,” which opened for midnight screenings on Thursday, drew a respectable number of fans on Friday, but fell off 18 percent on Saturday and was expected to fall off still more on Sunday, as have other horror films in the past.

“We see that Internet interest in a movie doesn’t necessarily translate to good box office,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a company that tracks the box office. “To some, the marketing was more exciting than the movie. Everyone was talking about the movie. But you have to convert that talk into moviegoing, otherwise it’s just talk.”

The film was still the No. 1 draw at the box office over the weekend when including $1.4 million from the Thursday-night screenings. “Talladega Nights” ranked second, drawing an estimated $14.1 million in its third weekend in theaters, for a total of $114.7 million. “World Trade Center” followed, taking in $10.8 million, and has sold $45 million in tickets since opening on Aug. 9. Another new release, a young-adult comedy from Universal titled “Accepted,” took in an estimated $10.1 million.

Overall, the box office is running solidly ahead of its disastrous performance in 2005, with no major movies left to be released in the summer season. Summer ticket sales now total $3.4 billion, up 7.6 percent over last summer’s total of $3.15 billion, according to Exhibitor Relations. Attendance is also up 4.36 percent over last summer.

But the improved numbers have not dissipated Hollywood’s concern over long-term prospects for the movie industry, and “Snakes on a Plane” was an important experiment for determining whether movie fans active online would also become paying customers at the movie theater.

Many films have been given a strong presence on the Internet to build anticipation, but “Snakes on a Plane,” a relatively low-budget movie at $32 million with a decidedly B-level vibe, took the practice to a new level. Fans who visited the official Web site could enter a telephone number to send people a call from Mr. Jackson urging them to see what he suggested could be the best movie in history. This past weekend, people who bought tickets online could participate in exit polls by sending opinions by text message to the studio.

New Line had even incorporated ideas from bloggers, who began writing about the movie months ago, excited at the prospect of Mr. Jackson, with his ultracool image, facing down a plane full of snakes. The filmmakers even reshot some scenes at the bloggers’ suggestion to make the movie harder-edged, with more rough language and violence to give it an R rating. They also added a signature line for Mr. Jackson, who shouts an unprintable epithet about the snakes that originated from Web chatter.

In addition to these efforts, New Line conducted a more traditional marketing campaign, spending upward of $20 million on movie prints and on advertising, including television. The studio declined to screen the film for critics before the opening.

But all this effort, it seemed, yielded no more results than the conventional methods used by Hollywood for decades.

Mr. Dergarabedian suggested that perhaps the most entertaining part of the experience was talking about the movie on the Internet. “If you’re a heavy blogger, or Internet user, maybe you’re not a heavy moviegoer,” he said. “You may spend a lot of time on the Internet, on MySpace, talking about movies, and that was the most fun part of it. The movie was almost an afterthought.”

At New Line executives were still chewing over the results of their rollicking Internet experiment. “We’ll make money with this picture, it’s just more disappointing because of all the inflated expectations,” Mr. Tuckerman said. “Now we have to sit back and figure out how to take the lessons from it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/movies/21box.html





Rattlers Freed In "Snakes On A Plane" Theater Prank

Life imitating art is all very well. Unless, that is, it's a movie about deadly snakes on the rampage.

Movie chain AMC Entertainment Inc. said pranksters at one of its Phoenix theaters released two live diamondback rattlesnakes during a showing of the film "Snakes on a Plane" last Friday. No one was injured.

AMC spokeswoman Melanie Bell said, "One was found in the parking lot during the show, and the other in the movie theater. They were both removed, and no one was harmed."

The snakes were later released in the desert.

Bell had no further details.

The movie stars Samuel L. Jackson, and spins a yarn about a crate-load of escaped snakes that run amok on an airline flight, attacking passengers and crew.

"There were kids at the show, and it was actually very reckless," Russ Johnson, the president of the Phoenix Herpetological Society told Reuters.

"The snakes' bite carries a powerful venom that could have seriously injured someone," he added.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...1-MostViewed-2





Steal This Film!
TankGirl

A Swedish pro-piracy documentarist group calling itself The League of Noble Peers has just released a 32 minute long video titled Steal This Film!. The documentary is available in iPod, standard (.mov) and DVD formats.

On the video the various insiders of the Swedish pirate movement talk about how piracy evolved into a national hobby and a political movement in Sweden. The guys who founded and are running Pirate Bay give their own personal accounts on the May 31 raid. Their interviews give insight into how determined they are in promoting the pirate agenda, above all as a free speech issue. Many common Swedish filesharers are interviewed as well. Their fearless, open, consumer-style approach into piracy issues and services can be an eye-opener for many non-Swedes on how far things have really advanced in the social climate of this high-tech nation of 9 million people. There is no way Hollywood lobbyists can regain a hold on these people's minds. They all consider it given that free filesharing is here to stay and show tangible defiance against any outside pressuring on their filesharing habits.

In the true spirit of piracy, the document borrows freely material from different Hollywood movies and propaganda advertisements, combining it to the fresh interview material. The League of Noble Peers is working on continuation to this document.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22990

http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com





Dixie Chicks Documentary Could Be Election Issue
Gregg Goldstein

The politically charged documentary "Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing" has been picked up for worldwide distribution by the Weinstein Co.

A release is tentatively scheduled for the fall, possibly right before the November elections.

The film revolves around the aftermath of singer Natalie Maines' statement at a 2003 London concert, where she said, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

It chronicles death threats, political attacks and radio boycotts against the country trio, and that could make the film a political hot potato as well as potential ammo should longtime Democratic party supporter Harvey Weinstein become involved in the fall political campaigns.

Asked why she and co-director/producer Barbara Kopple chose to go with the Weinstein Co., Cecilia Peck said, "They made a great offer," though no figures were disclosed. Such companies as Focus Features and Picturehouse expressed interest in the documentary a few months ago.

Sources involved in the negotiations said some parties in the documentary's camp wanted to screen the entire film for several indie distributors, while others only wanted a 15-minute highlight reel to be shown. Eventually only two final bidders were allowed to see a complete rough cut of the film: the Weinstein Co. and Sony Pictures Classics, a sister company of the Dixie Chicks' Columbia Records label.

"I am extremely proud to be associated with this film because it's not only an outstanding and creative piece of work, but it also exposes our responsibility as Americans to confront our fundamental right to freedom of speech," Weinstein said.

Kopple said plans for a grassroots promotional campaign are still being discussed, and Peck said the film is likely to be a hot topic in the approaching elections. "It deals with freedom of speech, censorship and other important issues," Kopple said. "It looks at the cost of standing up for what you believe in."

The documentary still is being completed ahead of its world premiere at next month's Toronto International Film Festival.

In addition to chronicling the lives of Maines and bandmates Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, Kopple said the documentary features clips from 15 of the Dixie Chicks songs and a new one written especially for the film, though no soundtrack is planned. "You definitely feel like you're in the front row of a Dixie Chicks concert," Peck said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...archived=False





Stones Bringing It All Back Home In London
Lars Brandle

Long gone are the days when the Rolling Stones courted controversy with their sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll antics. Nowadays, the health of the surviving band members is more often the hot talking point.

The first signs were there when drummer Charlie Watts was diagnosed in 2004 with cancer of the throat, a disease which he has apparently defeated. Then came guitarist Keith Richards' bizarre head injury, sustained earlier this year when he reportedly fell from a tree in Fiji. Richards, as befits his reputation, made a remarkable recovery.

With the start of their European tour accordingly delayed by six weeks, fellow guitarist Ron Wood entered rehab to deal with his alcoholism.

The latest health complaint to dog the band, a throat concern for frontman Mick Jagger, caused the band to pull dates in Spain in past week. But on Sunday night here in London, Jagger was in full voice, with the band reliable as ever.

The biggest show around rolled into town -- Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wood and co., collectively back on home turf for the opening U.K. night of the behemoth "A Bigger Bang" tour. "It's funny. You go around the world 10 times and end up where you started, in Twickenham, Richmond," Jagger, a "local," told the crowd at Twickenham Stadium.

The rock titans certainly made themselves feel at home, cranking out a slew of hits from their illustrious recording career. From the opening track "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and its follow-up, "Start Me Up," it was obvious that the band members certainly weren't slowing down. Richards, introduced by Jagger to the audience as "chief headbanger," was all-smiles from the first chord. The age lines are there to see on their faces, but the Stones' years certainly haven't been spent eating. Their bodies are all-sinew and muscle -- Jagger's biceps looking particularly ripped. These Rolling Stones gather no fat.

On numerous occasions, the Stones exposed a wealth of riches with respect to their catalog. "Ruby Tuesday," "Sympathy For the Devil," "It's Only Rock 'n Roll" (But I Like It), "Brown Sugar," and the encore "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" were on offer. At one point, a riser on which the band and backing musicians were huddled, disengaged from the stage and traveled toward the front of house. Who needs a catwalk? A mini-set which included "Miss You," "Get Off Of My Cloud and "Honky Tonk Women" ensued.

Twickenham, a leafy West London suburb whose stadium is recognized as the "home of English rugby," hosted Sunday night's concert by default. A performance on such grand a scale would usually be expected to play out at the reconstructed Wembley Stadium, but a series of set-backs has meant the latter venue is no-where near completion. "I think they're going to get Wembley ready for the farewell tour of the Artic Monkeys," Jagger quipped.

By the numbers, the tour is looming to be the biggest-ever. Prior to Sunday night, "A Bigger Bang" reported $256.08 million in grosses from 72 shows in U.S. arenas and international stadiums. They were scheduled to play another show Tuesday, before heading to Glasgow, Sheffield and Cardiff.

Perhaps surprisingly, a number of the "cheap seats" were noticeably empty, but then again tickets did cost upwards of $310 each (including fees).

The band's power to pull rock royalty, and beyond, remains undimmed. Australia's former Wimbledon tennis act Pat Cash was one of the faces in the crowd. "It's a really good show. It's pretty astounding that they are still there," Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes told Billboard.com after he caught the band in Nice, France. "The place was packed and it was fun to see."

And packed Twickenham Stadium was too. It might only be rock and roll, but the Stones showed again that they still like it.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...archived=False





Bob Dylan Says Modern Recordings "Atrocious"

Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday.

Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."

Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.

"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...archived=False

Thanks Multi!



Group Develops Video-Display Technology
Frank Jordans

Researchers have developed a video-display technology that can produce an unlimited range of colors by flexing tiny artificial "muscles" that generate different shades by expanding and contracting in response to electricity.

The flexible material allows individual pixels - the dots that make up an image on a screen - to display "every single natural color," said Manuel Aschwanden, a project researcher and nanotechnology specialist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

By contrast, conventional displays rely on ever smaller pixels that trick the eye into seeing a color that is in fact mixed from the three basic colors red, green and blue.

Peter Bryanston-Cross of the Optical Engineering Laboratory at Warwick University, England, said a device based on the new technology "would be a significant achievement," but noted that "there can be a long jump to move from primitive demonstrator to actual new technological displays."

"But it's a very interesting and remarkable achievement, with real potential," said Bryanston-Cross, who was not involved in the Swiss research.

The Zurich team's work, led by Professor Andreas Stemmer and published in the September edition of the scientific journal Optics Letters, poses "a serious challenge to big manufacturers," said Aschwanden. He said it could allow high-end optical equipment such as microscopes to be produced more cheaply and efficiently.

It also promises to significantly increase the screen resolution of conventional computer monitors.

"At the moment most screens achieve three to four pixels per millimeter (75-100 dots per inch). If you look closely enough at the current screens, you can still see the individual pixels. Our system can achieve 16 pixels per millimeter (400 dpi)."

According to Aschwanden, current display technology is limited because screens have to create all colors by combining red, green and blue.

"The problem with normal LCD screens is that they start with just one shade of red. If you want dark red, you need to create that first by mixing the available red with green and blue, and so the color isn't pure," he said. "Our screens allow you to define the precise wavelength of the colors you want to combine, and display different shades, such as the color of the sky or the sea, much more accurately."

The team has been working on the project for about a year and a half, said Aschwanden.

Among the practical problems the Swiss researchers still have to overcome are the large internal voltage required to power the display.

Aschwanden said the team had been contacted by a number of well-known technology companies, but he refused to divulge names.

The goal, he said, is to produce the new screens within the next 10 years.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-24-15-53-18





TiVo to Provide DVR Software to Cox
AP

TiVo Inc. Thursday said it had agreed to provide cable company Cox Communications with software for digital video recorders.

The deal with Cox comes on the heels of TiVo's recent patent win against satellite-TV broadcaster EchoStar Communications Corp., and further strengthens TiVo's hand against cable companies who provide their own DVRs to customers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Shares of Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo rose 50 cents, or 7 percent, to close at $7.68 Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The deal with Atlanta-based Cox is TiVo's second agreement with a major cable operator. The company announced a similar deal with Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, about a year ago. It also has a deal with satellite-TV provider DirecTV Group Inc.

As with the Comcast deal, TiVo's agreement with Cox will allow customers to use TiVo's DVR capabilities without swapping out boxes. Instead, TiVo will customize its software so it can be downloaded onto Cox's existing DVR boxes.

The service is scheduled to become available in selected Cox markets during the first half of 2007, TiVo said.

A federal jury in April determined that EchoStar, the country's second-largest satellite company with 12.5 million customers, willfully infringed on TiVo's "time-warp" patent with its own DVRs. Then last week, a U.S. district judge ordered EchoStar to stop selling and turn off more than 3 million DVRs within 30 days.

EchoStar, Englewood, Colo., has been able to temporarily block the injunction by appealing to a higher court, thus winning some time to negotiate with TiVo. Industry observers noted that the recent course of events with EchoStar likely would pressure other cable companies such as Time Warner Inc.'s cable unit or Charter Communications Inc. into licensing deals with TiVo.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-24-17-03-19





AOL to Sell Movies, Shows Through Portal
Anick Jesdanun

"Hitch," "24" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are among the movies and television shows that AOL will sell through its new video portal under deals the Internet company has forged with major Hollywood studios.

The partnerships, announced Thursday, represent AOL's latest efforts to become the destination for online video as the company tries to offset revenues it expects to lose from a recent decision to drop subscription fees for many high-speed customers.

The offerings also mark the latest experiments in online distribution as studios and TV networks try everything from showing programs for free on their Web sites to selling already-aired episodes for $1.99 each through Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, Google Inc.'s video store and others.

The AOL deals, terms for which were not disclosed, are with News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group. AOL LLC is a unit of Time Warner. NBC Universal is a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal.

Users will be able to download selected titles from those studios for $9.99 to $19.99 each, comparable to fees at online services CinemaNow, MovieLink and Guba.

Initial titles available include "Hitch" and "Spider-Man 2." AOL said hundreds of movies will be added within a few weeks, likely including "Batman Forever," "The Matrix," "American Pie" and "Dr. Dolittle."

Although users will own the titles, meaning viewing won't be automatically disabled after a day or two, the movies can be played on only a limited number of Windows-based personal computers or portable devices that support Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player technology. Limits vary, but they are about four devices for movies and 10 for television shows.

For now, movies may not be burned onto DVDs, a restriction that so far has limited the appeal of movie downloads.

Kevin Conroy, executive vice president for AOL, said support for Apple's Macintosh computers is expected this fall, but users won't be able to transfer the programs to its market-leading iPod players.

AOL will also sell Fox television shows for $1.99 an episode. The offerings include current series such as "24," "Prison Break" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," along with classics like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Hill St. Blues."

Older Sony hits such as "Charlie's Angels," "Starsky & Hutch," and "SWAT" will be shown for free with ads and for $1.99 without. The paid version comes with offline and portable viewing.

AOL already has a partnership with Warner Bros., called "In2TV," for free showings of classics like "Welcome Back Kotter," "Sisters" and "Growing Pains."

AOL has been trying to increase traffic to its ad-supported Web sites and earlier this month launched a video portal that tries to aggregate clips and full-length programs from around the Internet. Its partners are able to program a number of video-on-demand channels, and the new deals add five from Fox and two from Sony for television programs.

Conroy said AOL's decision to charge for some programs is consistent with its desire to offer users choice - download-to-own offerings alongside free, ad-supported items. He said AOL is becoming one of the few places where users can get a range of movies, television shows and music videos; many of its rivals focus on one or the other.

Rob Enderle, an industry analyst with the Enderle Group, said that while Apple got a head start with iTunes, AOL still has millions of subscribers connecting through its proprietary software - a base the company could try to persuade to buy movies.

Benjamin Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, said he was drawn by the traffic AOL already gets and the fact that Sony can choose between selling programs and giving away ad-supported shows. He said talks were continuing with others, including Apple.

Shares of Time Warner fell 11 cents to close at $16.43 Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-24-16-58-15





Take the Liquids, but Leave the Laptops
Joe Sharkey

Domestic air travel seems to have returned to normal, surviving the latest disruption that started about two weeks after the British authorities announced that they had foiled a plot to use liquid explosives to blow up passenger planes bound for the United States.

Americans have basically said that they are not afraid; at least, that was my impression on a flight here on Friday.

I am working on a project while being holed up here in the desert, which meant that I had to check a bag filled with the needed paperwork. The Newark airport was jammed, but the lines to check bags moved smoothly. So did the long line at the security checkpoints, where travelers seemed to take in stride the prohibitions against carrying on liquids and gels. And the screeners with the Transportation Security Administration seemed to be going out of their way to treat travelers courteously, while keeping the lines moving.

“It’s amazing. Everybody just seems to be with the program,” one screener said.

In a summer with record demand and with planes fuller than ever, there have been many delays and cancellations and missed connections. But my Continental flight took off from Newark only 15 minutes late and arrived in Houston a few minutes early. I was in coach. They served a decent chicken sandwich with a salad. My connecting flight from Houston to Tucson also arrived early.

At the Tucson airport, my bag tumbled onto the carousel 15 minutes after arrival. At the rental car counter, my rental agreement and keys were in a slot marked with my name. I was in bed by 11:30 listening to the call of the coyotes.

Nobody has ever accused me of being a shill for the airlines or a Pollyanna about air travel. But I have to say that I got from Point A to Point B last week without a hassle. Credit must be paid to the airlines, the security agency and to sensible fellow travelers.

Now let’s go back almost two weeks to the scenes of frightened chaos in London, where people once faced down the blitz with aplomb. All of a sudden, Heathrow and other airports seemed to be in pandemonium after the police announced — and the details are still sketchy, if you ask me — that they had thwarted a bombing plot.

“All carry-ons were banned,” said Greeley Koch, the president of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, who was at Heathrow that day booked on a flight to Chicago.

“After they made me check my laptop and other electronics, I went to buy a book and was told I couldn’t take a book on board,” Mr. Koch said. “They said a weapon could be hidden in a hollowed-out book. It didn’t seem to matter that a screener can easily flip through a book and see.”

After his flight took off many hours late, Mr. Koch had the occasion — there being nothing else to do — to reflect on the fact that dozens of business travelers like himself were on this long-haul daytime flight, unable to get any work done.

Security specialists that I know point out that we could all fly naked and the aviation system would still be riddled with holes — cargo handling, ramp access security, among other things. But suddenly, in the panic over carry-on liquids, the idea of banning laptops and other electronic gear was widely in circulation. That would be a serious problem for many business travelers, who have rolled with the punches so far.

Of about 200 corporate travel managers who responded to questions posed by Mr. Koch’s group the day after the London incident, two-thirds said there had not been a significant number of cancellations of business trips to Europe. A little over 30 percent said that some trips had been postponed for a week or so. And nearly 60 percent of the travel managers said they had business travelers stranded in Britain the previous day.

And nearly two-thirds of the travel managers questioned said employees would definitely travel less if laptops and other electronic devices were banned from airplane cabins. The other third said they were not sure.

Tom Byrum is a project manager for a software consulting company near Philadelphia who takes three or four business trips a month, some regional and some transcontinental. If he could not have his hand-held device and laptop on board, Mr. Byrum said, he couldn’t curtail business travel, but he’d drive on regional trips, not fly.

“If I weren’t allowed to take my electronics on board, I wouldn’t be able to get any work done, even when waiting for a flight, which is inevitably delayed,” he said. “On board, they’d have to sedate me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/business/22road.html





Gateway Gets $450M Bid For Retail Ops

Gateway Inc. has received an unsolicited offer from eMachines founder Lap Shun Hui to acquire the computer and printer maker's retail operations for $450 million.

Shares of Gateway soared 28 percent to $2.20 in pre-market trading Wednesday after the news.

China-born entrepreneur Hui sold low-cost PC maker eMachines to larger rival Gateway in early 2004 for about $290 million in cash and stock. He is now Gateway's second-largest shareholder, behind company founder Ted Waitt, and has previously expressed interest in buying Gateway and taking it private.

Hui, who now owns office-products development firm Joui International, said in a letter to Gateway Chairman Rick Snyder that in order to effectively compete, Gateway must separate its retail operations from its other businesses, as well as make other changes to improve margins.

"I am very disappointed that Gateway has chosen not to constructively engage in discussions with me and my advisors on the proposal that I sent to you on Aug. 3," Hui wrote in a letter dated Monday. "I believe that management and the board need to adopt a sense of urgency to address Gateway's problems."

"The landscape of the PC business has continued to evolve rapidly and Gateway has not reacted. Gateway's stock price has continued to decline and the failure to name a replacement CEO for over six months has left Gateway in a position where it is unable to clearly and credibly articulate its strategic direction to the market," he wrote.

Hui also said he would consider acquiring all Gateway shares and separating the businesses himself, if Gateway prefers that route.

Gateway said its board will review Hui's bid with the help of its financial and legal advisers.

Gateway shares closed Tuesday at $1.72 on the New York Stock Exchange. Last fall, the stock traded at a 52-week high of $3.25, but has since steadily declined to hit a year-low of $1.30 earlier this month. Shares are down 34 percent since the beginning of the year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-23-08-42-42





Sony Pictures Buys Video-Sharing Site
Gary Gentile

Sony Pictures Entertainment has acquired online video-sharing site Grouper Networks Inc. for $65 million, giving the movie studio a foothold in the fast-growing world of user-generated video.

Sony said Tuesday it does not immediately plan to sell its movies or TV shows on the Grouper.com site, although it may in the future.

Media companies, including Sony, have begun to offer content side by side with videos shot by amateurs on sites such as MySpace, Guba and BitTorrent.

Grouper will remain an independent company based in Sausalito and will retain its current management team, the companies said.

"Consumers are spending more and more time on sites like Grouper, and as one of the world's largest creators of entertainment, we want to be where the audiences are," said Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures, part of Sony Corp.

In addition to featuring short videos uploaded to the site by users, Grouper also provides software that allows people to place those videos on social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster using its peer-to-peer network. The software also allows others to e-mail the videos to friends and to download them to portable devices.

That kind of "viral" video sharing could be valuable to a studio like Sony looking for new ways to market films and TV shows.

Lynton said Sony views Grouper as a profitable stand-alone business that could boost revenue in the future by selling ads. Big media companies are searching for ways to profit as advertisers move dollars online, away from traditional broadcast outlets.

Sony could also discover new talent on the site, Lynton said.

"If we can find great talent on Grouper, it would be an added benefit," Lynton said.

One of the most popular features on Grouper is "mashups," which encourage users to create new videos from snippets of other videos.

Sony was a pioneer in that area, offering its own Web-based video creation tools in 2001 on a service called Screenblast. The site allowed users to combine clips from Sony movies and tracks from Sony recording artists to create new videos.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-23-00-31-57





S. Korea to Get New Versions Of Windows
Jae-Soon Chang

Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it would release new versions of Windows in South Korea this week to comply with an antitrust ruling against the U.S. software company.

Earlier this year, the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Microsoft 32.5 billion won ($34 million) and ordered it to provide two separate versions of Windows, saying the company abused its dominant market position by tying certain software to its Windows operating system.

In compliance with the ruling, Microsoft will release two new versions of Windows on Thursday, a company official said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy. One of them will be stripped of Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger and the other carries links to Web pages that allow consumers to download competing versions of such software, he said.

The move comes after a Seoul court last month rejected Microsoft's request for a stay of the penalties while the company pursues a legal challenge to the antitrust ruling.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is pursuing an appeal to the Fair Trade Commission's ruling in the Seoul High Court. That is unaffected by last month's decision regarding the stay request.

Microsoft is engaged in a similar case in Europe.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-23-01-04-52





Microsoft Will Re-Release 'Butchered' Patch
Robert McMillan

Instead of making the browser more secure, Microsoft Corp.'s August Internet Explorer security update introduced a critical security bug, according to researchers at eEye Digital Security Inc. Now the entire MS06-042 update is slated for re-release -- but due to further quality-control problems, the company isn't sure when.

Microsoft released the security patch, known as MS06-042 on August 8, but users soon reported several problems with the software.

Patched browsers would crash when using Web-based versions of several applications, including PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Sage CRM. Web sites that used HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) 1.1 compression to speed up the downloading of images could also cause the browser to fail.

These issues are described on the Microsoft site. The MS06-042 update is detailed on TechNet.

Last week, Microsoft released a "hotfix" download that addressed these problems and said it planned to re-issue the update, known as MS06-042, on Tuesday August 22, but that date has now been pushed back indefinitely.

"Due to an issue discovered in final testing, Microsoft will not be re-releasing MS06-042 today," the company said Tuesday in an advisory posted to its Web site. "This update will be re-released for Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 when it meets an appropriate level of quality for broad distribution."

According to a source familiar with the matter, the delay is due to a problem in distributing the patch with Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) product. The patch does work with the company's free update services, like Windows Update, the source added. "Obviously not everyone has bought [Microsoft's] SMS product and that shouldn't be a reason to delay patches," the source said.

Microsoft did add that it was investigating the reported security problem, discovered by eEye Digital Security Inc.

According to eEye, the browser-crashing bug could also be used by attackers to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC.

"What people didn't know about that patch is when [Microsoft] introduced that patch, they actually introduced a new exploitable vulnerability," said eEye Chief Hacking Officer Marc Maiffret. "They basically butchered that patch."

EEye discovered the security problem last week after looking more closely at the crashing problem, but the company believes that the security hole is also known by other security researchers and exploit writers.

"The bad guys basically know about this and know that it's an exploitable scenario," Maiffret said.

Researchers at eEye have created a "proof of concept" exploit for the problem in their labs, but Maiffret did not know of any such code being released to the public. This lessens the likelihood of a widespread attack based on the bug.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9002656





Microsoft Signs Ad Deal With Facebook
AP

Microsoft Corp. has struck a deal to provide advertising for social networking site Facebook, in one of the first high-profile agreements for the software maker's online advertising platform.

Under the deal announced late Tuesday, Microsoft will sell and provide banner ads and sponsored links for Facebook using the adCenter online advertising platform and other in-house technology and services.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. It is expected to run through mid-2009.

Microsoft and privately held Facebook said they only began discussing a deal in earnest late last week, and the companies hope the advertising will start appearing by early fall. Facebook is currently selling advertising on its own and has in the past used a couple other companies for that service, said Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief operating officer.

Redmond-based Microsoft officially launched adCenter last spring as a way to compete with companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which both derive significant revenue from their online advertising networks.

Earlier this month, Google struck a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace.com, the top social-networking site, to pay at least $900 million in shared advertising revenue and become the online hangout's exclusive search provider. Under the multiyear deal, Fox Interactive Media will add Google search boxes to MySpace and other sites. Google also get first rights to sell any display ads Fox doesn't sell directly.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-23-00-30-42





Microsoft Considers Discounts for Vista
Elizabeth M. Gillespie

Microsoft Corp. is considering discounts or other promotions during the holidays to entice consumers to upgrade their PCs with Windows Vista, even though the new operating system isn't due to hit store shelves until January at the earliest.

Any end-of-the-year effort to spur PC purchases would likely please many retailers and computer manufacturers, who fear disappointing sales during the crucial holiday as consumers wait for the highly anticipated and long-delayed software.

Kevin Kutz, a director in Microsoft's Windows Client Group, confirmed Tuesday that the company is in talks with PC makers and retailers about a range of possible holiday promotions. But he declined to offer other details, such as whether they would apply only to new purchases.

Vista will be the first major upgrade to Microsoft's flagship operating system since Windows XP was released in 2001. After a series of delays, Microsoft said it appears to be on track to ship the business version of Vista in November and to consumers in January.

Last month, however, Kevin Johnson, co-president of the Microsoft division that includes Windows, said the company would not hesitate to delay Vista again if it has any concerns about product quality.

George Shiffler, research director at Gartner Group, revised his PC sales forecast for 2006 after Microsoft announced its latest Vista delay in March. He said he expects about 1.1 million fewer units to be sold worldwide than previously forecast.

Shiffler isn't expecting Microsoft to make the January release date. He notes that it usually takes Microsoft nine months to a year to ship the final product after its second "beta," or test, release. Vista Beta 2 came out in May.

He suggested some PC makers might be hoping for another delay, because marketing an operating system that doesn't exist yet is a formidable challenge they'd rather skip.

Instead, he thinks they'd rather wait for holiday and Super Bowl media distractions to end before trying to get customers excited about a new PC.

Microsoft's initial goal for the consumer market "was to get Vista-powered machines, new chips, Intel processors - have the whole thing come together in time for Christmas," said Ted Schadler, an industry analyst for Forrester Research Inc.

Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD Group questioned whether any Vista promotion would work before consumers can actually buy it.

"The issue isn't that people don't want to buy a new PC ahead of a new operating system," Baker said. "People don't want to install a new operating system on a new PC."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-22-21-15-40





Microsoft Sues 'Cybersquatters'
AP

Microsoft Corp. said it has filed three lawsuits against "cybersquatters," in an effort to fight back against a surge of online trademark infringement by people seeking profit from pay-per-click advertising.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant said cybersquatters and typosquatters - people who register Web addresses either with trademarked terms or with common misspellings in the hopes of luring Web surfers who mistype addresses into their browsers - are now registering more than 2,000 domains each day targeting Microsoft.

The vast majority of the sites, which have addresses like "microsoftrebate.com," "xbox36com.com" and "msnfinance.com," are bought by professional operations that place nothing on the pages but pay-per-click ads served by online-ad networks, Microsoft said. About a quarter of the sites use privacy services to disguise their identities.

"Microsoft has witnessed a virtual land rush for Internet domain names with the goal of driving traffic for profit," said Aaron Kornblum, the company's Internet Safety Enforcement attorney. The company noticed the surge in sites earlier this year as part of its efforts to monitor so-called phishing sites, which mimic bank and other sites as part of identity-theft schemes.

In response, Microsoft filed two civil lawsuits Monday against four defendants it said are profiting from domain names that infringe on Microsoft trademarks. One filed in U.S. District Court in Utah alleges that Jason Cox of Albuquerque, N.M., Daniel Goggins of Provo, Utah, and John Jonas, of Springville, Utah, together registered 324 domain names targeting Microsoft. The defendants do business as Jonas and Goggins Studios LLC and Newtonarch LLC.

In the second suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Microsoft alleges that Dan Brown of Long Beach, Calif., whose firm is Partner IV Holdings, registered 85 domain names targeting Microsoft.

The company also filed a "John Doe" lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The suit is aimed at identifying cybersquatters and typosquatters who conceal their identities, and Microsoft said it will soon issue subpoenas to domain-name registrars.

Microsoft argues that the Web sites are forbidden under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. That law, which was signed into law by President Clinton in 1999, imposes fines of up to $100,000 in damages for anyone who, with bad-faith intent to profit, "registers, traffics in or uses a domain name that is identical to, confusingly similar or dilutive of" an existing trademark, according to Microsoft. The suits also cite state laws and common law forbidding unfair competition.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-22-20-08-38





I.B.M. Extends Buying Spree With $1.3 Billion Deal

I.B.M., unveiling its third acquisition of a public company so far this month, said Wednesday it would spend $1.3 billion in cash for Internet Security Systems, which performs network monitoring and analysis services for companies.

All told, I.B.M.’s recent string of deal announcements — the other acquisitions were FileNet and MRO Software — has a total value of more than $3.6 billion, all of it to be paid in cash. And that figure does not include I.B.M.’s agreement to buy privately held Webify Solutions, whose terms were not disclosed.

For all of 2005, I.B.M.’s acquisitions came to about $2 billion.

I.B.M. seems to have been fairly conservative in the prices of its latest deals. I.B.M.’s offer of $28 per share for Internet Security Systems represented a relatively modest 8 percent premium to the target company’s closing share price on Tuesday. I.B.M.’s offer for FileNet came with a razor-thin 1 percent premium.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=6648





Price Tag For Lost Productivity: $544 Billion
Leslie Taylor

Although most bosses assume the rank-and-file will have downtime every day, employees waste about twice as much time as their employers think, according to a new survey by Salary.com and America Online.

Employees spend an average of 1.86 hours per eight-hour workday on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks, the survey found. Based on those averages, employee time-wasting costs U.S. employers an estimated $544 billion in lost productivity (http://www.inc.com/articles/2002/06/24280.html) each year.

More than half (52 percent) of the 2,706 people surveyed admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours is surfing the Internet (http://www.inc.com/articles/2006/03/productivity.html) for personal use. Other distractions cited by respondents included socializing with co-workers (26.3 percent), running errands outside the office (7.6 percent) and spacing out (6.6 percent).

The good news for employers (http://www.inc.com/criticalnews/arti...productivity.h tml) is that time-wasting appears to be decreasing. In a similar survey conducted in 2005, U.S. workers admitted to squandering 2.09 hours per eight-hour workday. Thirty-three percent of those polled said they waste time at work because they don't have enough work to do, while 23.4 percent wasted time because they felt underpaid.

The 2005 survey also found that older employees wasted less time at work than their younger counterparts. People born between 1950 and 1959 waste 0.68 hours at work each day, while those born between 1980 and 1985 admit they waste 1.95 hours.
http://today.reuters.com//business/s...6169628659.xml





Unlock Work Internet Or Risk Losing Staff: Microsoft
Dan Warne

Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today.

“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist.

“People that I meet are saying this to me every day, all over the world.”

Kirah made the comments during the keynote at the opening of Microsoft’s annual developer love-in, Tech.Ed, in Sydney.

“Companies all over the world are saying, oh, you can’t be on the internet while you’re at work. You can’t be on instant messaging at work…” she said. “These are digital immigrant ideas.”

Kirah defines ‘digital immigrants’ as people who were not born into the digital lifestyle and view it as a distraction rather than an integral part of life. The younger generation of workers have been using computers and mobile phones since birth and she calls them ‘digital natives’.

Kirah cited a Norwegian psychologist who claimed that young people were now so reliant on digital communication that “taking a mobile phone away from a teenage girl is the same as child abuse.”

“Digital communication is part of people’s lives now. Their friends online are the people they identify with.”

Microsoft Australia Group Manager of Technical Communities Frank Arrigo said people were so frustrated with limited internet access at work that they were finding their own workarounds anyway.

People were increasingly making use of anonymous proxies that couldn’t be easily blocked by corporate firewalls, bringing in their own wireless broadband services for use with a personal laptop or with a work PC or accessing instant messaging via mobile phones and PDAs.

“People are hitting security barriers put in by the owners of the infrastructure, but employers see internet access as bad for productivity.”

“Bill Gates said years ago that if you worry about internet productivity, you’re worrying about people stealing pens from your stationery cupboard… there are bigger things to worry about.”

“Organisations have valid concerns about security risks, but all you need is technology to secure the network perimiter properly,” Arrigo said.

“We know of one woman who was so frustrated with her work blocking her 9 to 5 internet access that she’d spend her evenings doing research online and then she’d email it to herself to read at work the next day… there are a million ways around these limitations.”

Arrigo said employers needed to rethink their assumptions about internet usage. “For a lot of people now, instant messaging is a legitimate work tool that allows quick communication between colleagues, avoiding voicemail-tag and long distance charges, yet many companies block instant messaging completely.”

“They only see the downside of it; they assume it’s a time waster.”

While Kirah and Arrigo’s comments no doubt resonate with many frustrated office workers around the world, they also have a business motivation for Microsoft.

Because Microsoft’s Windows Live services will be advertiser-funded, the more people that have access to them, the more money Microsoft makes.

“Our business model is advertising. With advertising you want reach,” George Moore, General Manager Windows Live Platform told APC.

Frank Arrigo said it wasn’t only about using the net at work: employees are also becoming increasingly frustrated with companies that don’t make it easy to access complete company network resources from home.

“The tools are available, but it’s a matter of educating IT departments that it can be done securely. In the case of Microsoft, our 70,000 staff have a smart card that authenticates a secure network link in to work.”

Citrix also offers a product, GoToMyPC, which allows remote screen sharing of work PCs even through restrictive corporate firewalls. It encapsulates the screen-sharing data in standard HTTP packets.
http://www.apcstart.com/site/dwarne/...taff-microsoft





About Batteries: Tips on Longevity and Reviving the Dead
Eric A. Taub



Rechargeable batteries are the brawn behind the brains of today’s portable electronic devices. But unless a cellphone dies in the middle of a call, or you are trying to determine which of your six charging devices to stuff into a suitcase before a flight, you might not give batteries much thought.

Dell’s recall of batteries for more than four million laptop computers, though, has brought renewed attention to the temperamental nature of a crucial power source.

Dell said a manufacturing defect in some lithium-ion batteries supplied by Sony caused a handful to smolder and catch fire, and it advised owners of affected computers to run them on wall current until replacement batteries arrived. Smaller recalls in the past, involving laptops and other devices, have also focused on lithium-ion batteries. But the industry was quick to offer reassurances.

“The industry makes hundreds of millions of lithium-ion units and ships them to every continent each year,” said Norm England, president of the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association, a trade group. “The average consumer should not be concerned about safety.”

Rechargeable batteries come in two popular types. Lithium-ion batteries are generally found in laptops, cellphones and iPods; nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries are used in cordless phones and less-expensive digital cameras, plus a few laptops.

Batteries of both types are usually manufactured specifically for the devices they power, with their own proprietary recharging plugs, leaving the typical consumer with a jumble of chargers to manage. But following a few routines can help make the batteries run longer and more safely. And a variety of gadgets are also emerging to ease the burden of recharging them — and the space you need for chargers in your suitcase.

Keeping a Charge

Lithium-ion batteries are particularly sensitive to heat. To avoid the danger of a fire, they should not be stored in places that get direct sunlight, like a car’s interior. Many manufacturers specify a temperature range for operation. In addition, the connectors should be kept away from metals that could cause a short circuit.

Regardless of type, there are a number of ways to increase the life of a rechargeable battery. According to Brian Kimberlin, director of consumer batteries for the Panasonic Battery Corporation of America, one of the best strategies to prolong battery life is to use them. Otherwise, “they will lose their capacity to hold a charge,” he said.

On the other hand, continually keeping a laptop’s lithium-ion battery at full capacity also reduces the battery’s ability to live a long life.

“Leaving a notebook charged all the time is not a good idea,” said Andrew Bradner, senior product manager for the American Power Conversion Corporation, a maker of charging devices. To keep the battery able to hold a charge, it is best to use the battery and wall current alternately to run the laptop.

According to Michelle Thatcher, a senior associate editor at CNET.com, if you use only wall current to run the device, you should remove the laptop’s battery to prevent it from being constantly charged and becoming overheated.

A laptop continues to draw battery power when it is put to sleep. To cut back on power consumption, shut down the computer completely. And if your laptop comes equipped with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi abilities, shut them off if you are not actually using either; otherwise, current is drawn as the laptop searches for compatible devices with which to connect.

To reduce battery consumption further, both the Windows and Mac operating systems include control panels that allow users to increase battery life by simultaneously decreasing performance. (To get to the control panel in a Mac, go to the Energy Saver pane in System Preferences. On a Windows laptop, choose the Performance and Maintenance tab in the Control Panel icon, which is found under the Start menu.)

The hard disk can be made to spin down whenever possible, and the screen can be dimmed from maximum brightness when battery power is being used.

Other battery-saving strategies include removing a CD or DVD from the laptop’s slot when not in use to prevent the disk drive from needlessly spinning, and quitting any applications not currently in use. If you do not plan on using your laptop for several months, Apple Computer recommends that you remove the battery and store it at 50 percent of its charge. Storing it when completely discharged will prevent it from holding a charge later, while storing it when fully charged will reduce its maximum life, the company says.

Reducing the time a backlight is used is also a good strategy for maximizing an iPod’s battery life, Apple notes on its Web site.

Cellphone battery life benefits from some of the same conservation strategies that work with laptops: use menu options that keep the screen dimmed, turn off Java-based games, and disable Bluetooth when not connected to a Bluetooth device.

Recharging Made Easier

Of course, there will always come a time when recharging is necessary. To avoid lugging around a suitcase full of chargers, several manufacturers make all-in-one devices: charging bricks that come with a selection of tips to fit different tools.

The Universal Power Adapter ($100 from apc.com) comes with 10 adapter tips to recharge laptops. The device works with American and European line voltage, car voltage or even with the hard-to-find power outlets on planes. While charging a laptop, two additional devices like a hand-held or cellphone can be charged simultaneously.

The iGo Juice ($120 from igo.com and retailers) comes with eight power tips to recharge a range of laptop batteries. An optional iGo dualpower accessory ($25) allows one additional device, like a cellphone, digital camera or MP3 player, to be charged at the same time, using additional $10 adapter tips available on the company’s Web site. Less-expensive universal rechargers are available from iGo, starting at $40, but they cannot charge laptops.

For the times when AC power is not available but a charge is needed, several devices can help bridge the power gap. The APC Mobile Power Pack ($70), an external rechargeable battery, can give an additional 10 hours of talk time for cellphones, and up to 55 hours for an iPod Nano. U.S.B. connection cables for hand-helds, cellphones and other portable devices can be purchased separately from mobilecomputing.apc.com.

The tiny SideWinder portable generator ($20 from www.sidewinder.ca) is a useful cellphone recharging option when you are nowhere near wall current. Turning the crank for three minutes gives an additional two to eight minutes of talk time, depending on model. When not connected to a phone, the crank will charge a small light-emitting diode for up to two and a half minutes, to provide emergency lighting. The company sells a range of phone adapter plugs that will fit models from Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung and Siemens, among others.

If cranking is not your style, the Soldius1 Universal Solar Charger ($110 from www.mysoldius.com) can power up an iPod, cellphone, or P.D.A. in less than three hours, using only the sun’s rays.

Available in a variety of colors, the Soldius1, weighing three ounces and about the size of a portable calculator, comes with adapter plugs to fit iPods and other music players, cellphones and BlackBerrys.

If all of these tips seem daunting, the best strategy to increase battery life, according to Mr. England of the battery association, is “to read the owner’s manual of the product.” But with so many new portable electronic devices to cope with, that could be a challenge.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/te.../24basics.html





MIT Laptop Gets A New Name Just In Time For Field Tests
Ryan Paul

With a 500-unit field test ready to begin in September, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has announced that the much-anticipated, now-$140 laptop will be called Children's Machine 1 (CM1). Although MIT failed to reach the $100 price point, the Linux-based laptop is a remarkable achievement. Manufactured by Chinese hardware company Quanta, the rugged, portable computer features a 400mhz AMD Geode processor (the original prototypes had a 366mhz processor), 128MB of DRAM, built-in wireless support, and 512MB of flash memory for internal storage.

In addition to a faster processor, the CM1 sports several other new features not found in the original prototypes, including an SD card slot, microphone and speaker jacks (potentially for rumored VoIP support), and a digital camera capable of capturing video and still images (the drivers are actively being developed by Jonathan Corbet of Linux Weekly News). Technical details regarding the 8" LCD screen have also been released, and despite the initial skepticism of the naysayers, the folks at MIT have hit a home run. The display will feature 1200x900 resolution. In a statement on the OLPC web site, project chairman Nicholas Negroponte reveals that the CM1 display "has higher resolution than 95 percent of the laptop displays on the market today, approximately one-seventh of the power consumption, one-third of the price, sunlight readability, and room-light readability with the backlight off."

Tremendous progress has been made this summer on the Sugar user interface system that will be shipped with the CM1. Funded by Google through the Summer of Code (SoC) initiative, intrepid college student Erik Pukinskis has collaborated with the GNOME development community to adapt AbiWord for use with the portable Linux system. Although still experimental, AbiWord has successfully been integrated into the Sugar environment. Artists and developers continue to work on the evolving Sugar interface, and the fruits of their labor can be seen in demoes, mockups, and design reviews. Those interested in the interface development process can learn more by reading the Sugar development mailing list.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060825-7593.html





A Divide Over The Future Of Hard Drives
Michael Kanellos

Heat or dots? The question is dividing the hard drive industry as it prepares for a major product overhaul.

Perpendicular hard drive technology, which started appearing last year, currently lets manufacturers increase drive density, or the amount of data stored, by around 50 percent annually. But that pace of progress will likely sputter in about four to five years.

To keep progress going, the first disks based on new technology will need to enter the market around 2011. Competitors differ, however, on how and when ideas for revamping drives should become reality.

Seagate Technologies, the world's largest drive maker, wants to first adopt a concept called "heat-assisted magnetic recording." This involves heating microscopic cells on the disk platters as part of the recording process.

Meanwhile, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, No. 2 in the industry, favors going forward first with something called "patterned media." In this technique, the cells that store data--which now sit next to each other in a continuous film--would be isolated from each other like dots.

Time is of the essence: Five years--from concept to the first finished products that can be shipped to customers--isn't long. Additionally, Flash memory makers assert that their chips will start to displace drives in notebooks over the coming years. Drive makers scoff at the notion, but agree that technological changes need to occur for drives to protect their turf.

"We need to maintain that 40 percent areal-density growth rate, at a minimum, to stay ahead of flash, and we are dang well going to do it," said Mark Kryder, chief technology officer at Seagate.

Eventually, manufacturers will combine heat-assisted and patterned media to produce drives that will be capable of storing 50 to 100 terabits of data per square inch. That's 280 to 560 times more dense than the 178.8 gigabit-per-square-inch drive coming from Toshiba later this year. (A square inch of 100-terabit material could hold as much data as 12,500 pickup trucks filled with books.)

Seagate and Hitachi, as well as other drive makers, are experimenting with both technologies in their labs. Still, the next step is yet to be determined.

"Most people have thought heat assistance probably would be first, but who knows?" said Jim Porter, president of Disk/Trend, which analyzes the disk drive industry.

Superparamagneticexpialidocious
The enemy of hard drives is your thermostat. The devices store data in bits, which are microscopic spots on a hard drive platter. The bits themselves are made up of about 50 to 100 cobalt-platinum grains. When the grains get magnetized in a particular direction, the bit represents either a "1" or "0".

To increase the areal density, which is the amount of data a single platter inside a hard drive can hold, engineers have shrunk the size of bits and grains over the years. This has helped PC makers to boost the capacity of hard drives from a few megabytes to more than 100 gigabytes.

Successive years of shrinkage, however, have led to magnetic grains that measure about 8 nanometers long. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)

Reducing the grains further in size could cause them to flip at room temperature and so corrupt the data--an aspect of the "superparamagnetic effect," first identified in the mid-1990s by Stan Charap of Carnegie Mellon University. And cutting back on the number of grains inside each bit, absent further changes, would increase noise and lower reliability.

Drive manufacturers have bought time with perpendicular drives, which stack the bits vertically. But that solution doesn't eliminate the "no more shrinkage" problem.

One or the other
The heat-assisted camp wants to change the grains. Unlike cobalt-platinum grains, iron-platinum grains will not flip at room temperature, Kryder said. To record or erase data, a laser integrated into the drive would heat a particular bit. The data would get recorded or erased, and the bit would quickly cool.

"We'd have to change the (recording) head to add heat, but it's not that big of a deal," Kryder said. Adding a laser wouldn't increase costs much, he noted. More important, the bits could be applied to the platter surfaces through a film, which is how bits are applied today.

Material changes, however, are rarely easy; for example, the switch from aluminum to copper in semiconductors confounded semiconductor makers. For the heat-applied technology, engineers would have to perfect ways to pinpoint the heat from the laser.

"It requires small optical spots. It requires very sharp thermal gradients. It requires new materials," John Best, chief technologist at Hitachi, said, pointing out hurdles in the process.

"You could argue (about) which one's easier to solve, but it looked to us that the practical problems with patterned media meant that we could probably do it first more easily," Best added.

By contrast, the patterned media group wants to keep the current grains. It proposes, instead, reducing the number of grains in each bit from 100 to one, and then isolating the bits from each other to reduce cross-talk and the risk of data corruption, Best said. Initially, the grains in the first patterned media drives would be larger than the grains in today's drives, but the overall size of the bit would be smaller.

"With this, you can get a factor of 100 in increase in density. Of course, you have to scale everything else, so it will take time. But the problem of the temperature of the room reversing magnetization goes away," Best said.

So how do you create a pattern? A master pattern could be drawn with e-beam lithography. That pattern could then be transferred to a mold, which would then be used to stamp out the pattern on hard drive platters though imprint lithography.

Adopting e-beam and imprint lithography into mass manufacturing won't be easy. In fact, patterned media hard drives could easily become the first widescale application for both, Best said.

E-beam, which creates a pattern by firing electrons, was invented years ago to replace traditional lithography in chipmaking, but it never did. Imprint lithography, which makes an impression like that on a signet ring, was only developed in the last few years.

However, lithography of any kind is expensive, particularly when compared to the film-coating processes used today. "We don't have to personalize each bit by patterning it lithographically," Kryder noted, referring to the heat-assisted technique.

Both camps have published papers and lab results, but no one is close to having manufacturing samples. Hitachi, for instance, has created prototype components, but not complete patterned media drives.

Ultimately, the decision could turn on which technology looks easier to bring to mass manufacturing. This year, around 450 million to 460 million drives will leave factories, according to data from Disk/Trend.

"You've got to figure out how to do this, not just in a lab demonstration, but by producing them in the hundreds of millions," said Porter of Disk/Trend. "The good news is that you have people working in both of these camps, and maybe others. There's nano-this and nano-that."

No matter which goes first, the end is not near. Hard drive makers are even examining new materials that could take the grain size below 8 nanometers, although the current candidates are corrosive.

"We can see 50 to 100 terabits being possible," Kryder said. "We are three orders of magnitude from any truly fundamental limits."
http://news.com.com/A+divide+over+th...3-6108687.html





U.K. Spammer Gets Two-Month Curfew
Graeme Wearden

A U.K. teen pleaded guilty on Wednesday to breaking the Computer Misuse Act by crashing the e-mail server of his former employer.

David Lennon, 18, was then sentenced to a two-month curfew by a judge in the Wimbledon Magistrates court.

Lennon had originally been cleared of the charges in November 2005, after another judge ruled that it wasn't an offense to overwhelm an e-mail server with millions of messages. This ruling was later challenged by the Crown Prosecution Service. In May 2006, the case was sent back to the Magistrates Court.

On Wednesday, the judge ruled that Lennon should be subject to a curfew, which means he must stay at home between the hours of 12.30 a.m. and 7a.m. on weekdays, and between 12.30 a.m. and 10 a.m. on weekends. If he breaks this curfew, he risks a more serious sentence.

The curfew has been timed so as not to interfere with Lennon's work at a local cinema. The judge said it was a "happy coincidence" that it will end the day before Lennon starts college in September.

The prosecution dropped its demand that Lennon should pay costs amounting to $55,000 (29,000 pounds), which arose from his attack on Domestic & General Group in which 5 million e-mails crashed its servers.

The defense argued that Lennon should receive a conditional discharge, given the confusion over whether the Computer Misuse Act outlawed the sending of masses of e-mails. The judge, though, argued that this was inappropriate.

"Even given his age at the time, this was a grave offense and caused serious damage, so I need to impose something to make him think again," the judge told the court.

The Computer Misuse Act, which was introduced in 1990, explicitly outlaws the "unauthorized access" and "unauthorized modification" of computer material. Section 3, under which Lennon was charged, concerns unauthorized data modification and tampering with systems.

Lennon's original case was heard by a district judge, who ruled that massive amounts of e-mail did not violate the Computer Misuse Act because e-mail servers were set up to receive e-mails. As such, each individual email could be ruled to make an "authorized modification" to the server.

The Computer Misuse Act is now seen as insufficient to combat the rise of cybercrime such as denial-of-service attacks. A series of amendments are being introduced by the government to update it.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+spammer+get...3-6108625.html





New Rule: Car Buyers Must Be Told About 'Black Boxes'
Rule will also require a uniform set of data be recorded, making it easier to use.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has passed a regulation requiring car makers to inform customers when their car has been equipped with an Event Data Recorder, the agency said Monday.

EDRs, similar to "black boxes" used in commercial airliners, record data about what a car is doing in the moments just before and after a crash. They do not record the voices of occupants but they do record things like speed, steering wheel movement, how hard the brakes are being pressed and the actual movement of the car itself.

About 64 percent of model year 2005 cars were equipped with EDRs, according to NHTSA. Some manufacturers already include information about the EDR in the owners manual, but not all, said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for NHTSA.

"If you have a new vehicle, chances are it's got one," he said.

Data from the recorders is used by law enforcement and attorneys to recreate events directly leading up to an accident. Data is also used by car companies to research how cars and drivers perform in actual crashes.

Some privacy advocates have expressed concern that the data, which can be used as evidence in court cases, is being collected without the knowledge of vehicle owners and drivers.

The devices are virtually impossible to disable because their functioning is so tightly integrated with vehicle safety systems such as airbags and anti-lock brakes.

Several states have already passed laws that restrict how the data can be used.

Car companies must comply with the new regulation beginning in the 2011 model year. Information about the EDR, if one is installed, will have to be included in the vehicle's owner's manual.

The new rule also requires EDRs to collect a uniform set of data. Having access to uniform data will help investigators to recreate crashes and determine causes, the agency said.

More-uniform data will also make it easier to develop systems so that, in cars equipped with automatic 911 emergency notification, data about the crash can also be passed along to paramedics and ambulance crews.

The data can also be used to research better road designs and ways to better protect young and old drivers, said Robert Sinclair, a spokesman for the New York chapter of AAA.

AAA had previously expressed concern to NHTSA about privacy issues that might hamper public acceptance of the systems. Those concerns seem to be addressed by the new rule, Sinclair said.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/AUTOS/08/21/...ule/index.html





Homeland Security Chief Promises Privacy Safeguards
Joris Evers

Privacy rules will be closely regarded as intelligence gathering and sharing get a boost, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said.

Collecting more information and correlating data from various law enforcement agencies is crucial to national security, Chertoff told reporters Friday after touring a new, high-tech law enforcement center in this Los Angeles suburb. But increased intelligence gathering and sharing doesn't equal less privacy for U.S. citizens, he said.

"As we have broadened information sharing, we have made sure that there are strict rules in effect...that prevent people from misusing that information or putting it out improperly," he said. "That's built into the DNA of this and all of our intelligence-sharing capabilities."

While Chertoff offered privacy promises, his department has often raised the ire of privacy watchers. The Department of Homeland Security has been embroiled in a number of privacy flaps, including what independent government auditors last year called illegal data collection of some 250,000 airline passengers. This year, the department picked as a top privacy official a lawyer who defended the data collection as probably legal.

There are laws, including the USA Patriot Act, that strictly protect the gathered data, Chertoff said. "We're very sensitive about the issue of privacy in general when we maintain intelligence," he said. The Patriot Act is seen by opponents as giving law enforcement too much free rein in the name of national security.

Chertoff visited the first-of-its-kind Joint Regional Intelligence Center, which joins federal, state and local law enforcement in one facility. Analysts and investigators at the center handle intelligence from the various agencies on potential threats to national security, in particular terrorism, and correlate the data.

The center is part of a post-Sept. 11 effort to improve law enforcement collaboration and to "connect the dots" so potentially valuable intelligence does not go unnoticed.

"The whole name of the game here with counterterrorism is information sharing and early warning," Chertoff said. "Our radar for terrorism is intelligence...It is the radar of the 21st century, and if we let that radar go down, we're going to be flying blind."

Chertoff blasted a U.S. District Court decision last week to strike down the government's once-secret program for warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance. "If (the decision) were in fact ultimately to prevail, it would have a huge effect and a negative effect because it would really hamper our ability to collect intelligence," he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit against the government, claiming the program "ran roughshod" over the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and ran afoul of federal wiretapping law. The government has appealed the decision and can continue its surveillance program pending that appeal, Chertoff said.

"The ability to be nimble and efficient and use all of our tools--including all of our surveillance tools--in order to capture plots before they come to fruition is the No. 1 way we keep Americans safe," he said. He referenced the foiled terror plot to blow up transatlantic airliners as an example of good use of intelligence.

"We need to make sure we're not letting obstacles come in the way of sharing information and of getting information and analyzing it," Chertoff said.
http://news.com.com/Homeland+Securit...3-6107942.html





Kevin Mitnick Web Site Hacked
Joris Evers

Instead of the usual description of Kevin Mitnick, his consulting services and books, the famed hacker's Web site on Sunday displayed a vulgar message.

Online vandals, apparently operating from Pakistan, broke into the computer hosting Mitnick's Web site on Sunday and replaced his front page with one of their own. As a result, four Web addresses belonging to Mitnick, including KevinMitnick.com and MitnickSecurity.com, displayed an explicit message on Mitnick and hacking.

"The Web hosting provider that hosts my sites was hacked," Mitnick told CNET News.com in an interview Monday. "Fortunately, I don't keep any confidential data on my Web site, so it wasn't that serious. Of course, it is embarrassing to be defaced--nobody likes it."

Mitnick's name is synonymous with "notorious hacker" for many. He was caught by the FBI in 1995 after a well-publicized pursuit and spent five years behind bars for wire and computer fraud. Today, he is a consultant, has written two books, and spends much of his time on the road at speaking engagements.

Mitnick heard out about the defacement on Sunday afternoon, shortly after the initial compromise, he said. The attackers gained complete control over the server that hosts his site as well as others at hosting provider Hostedhere, Mitnick said. It is common that hosting companies store multiple customers' Web sites on one server.

"The attackers from Pakistan took over that whole box. There were a whole bunch of customers, including myself, but my site was the only one defaced, so I was probably the target," Mitnick said. The server was taken offline to be reinstalled, Mitnick said. The Web site was still offline as of late Monday afternoon Pacific Time.

Web site defacements still occur, but they have become less high profile in recent years as financially motivated threats take the spotlight.

The message placed on Mitnick's Web site started with: "ZMOG!! THE MITNICK GOTZ OWNED!!" and continues with expletives and a picture of Mitnick with some modifications. Security Web site Zone-H first reported the hack on Monday and has screenshots of the replaced Web pages.

Defacing Web sites is akin to graffiti in the brick-and-mortar world. "It is kind of stupid; they do it for the attention," Mitnick said. "When I was a hacker, I never stooped to defacing sites because that was more like vandalism; that wasn't any fun. It is more about getting in and being stealth and looking around and exploring."

So far, Mitnick doesn't know how the server containing his Web site was compromised. He plans to investigate that at a later time. It could be that a security flaw on one of the other Web sites that was hosted on the same server gave the attackers a way into Mitnick's portion of the machine, he said.

"When you're with Web hosting companies, your security is as good as theirs. You just have to live with that," Mitnick said. "When you want to raise the bar, you have to set it up yourself. I don't have the time to maintain a Web site."

Hostedhere, Mitnick's hosting provider located in Greenville, S.C., did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

"They do a good job. I don't think they're insecure," Mitnick said, adding that he would switch Web hosting providers only if his site gets hacked continuously.

This isn't the first time that a Mitnick Web site has been defaced. Three years ago, a site set up by Mitnick's supporters was repeatedly hacked. Mitnick did not operate those sites. He was not allowed to use computers at that time as part of the terms of his supervised release from prison, he said.
http://news.com.com/Kevin+Mitnick+We...3-6108032.html





A lot of zeros

Apple Settles With Creative for $100 Million
Tom Krazit

Apple Computer and Creative Technology have agreed to settle their legal dispute over music player patents for $100 million, the companies announced Wednesday.

The $100 million, to be paid by Apple, grants Apple a license to a Creative patent for the hierarchical user interface used in that company's Zen music players. After months of hinting that it would be coming after rival music player companies, Creative sued Apple in May, claiming the iPod maker was infringing on its patents.

A week later, Apple countersued, claiming Creative was infringing on Apple patents for user interfaces. As a result of the settlement, all legal disputes between the two companies related to the patent will disappear. Creative had also asked the International Trade Commission to investigate Apple for patent infringement.

The patent covers an interface that lets users navigate through a tree of expanding options, such as selecting an artist, then a particular album by that artist, then a specific song from that album, said Phil O'Shaughnessy, a Creative spokesman. The patent applies to portable media players, which includes devices like the iPod or cell phones that have the ability to play music, he said. Creative filed for the patent on Jan. 5, 2001.

Apple can get back some of the $100 million payment if Creative is able to secure licensing deals with other MP3 player manufacturers, said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. He declined to specify exactly how much Apple could recoup or how many deals it would take to trigger the payments.

"Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent," Apple's CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release. Apple was eager to move beyond the legal dispute caused by the patent, which could have eventually cost the company as much as the $100 million settlement amount, Dowling said.

"We're very pleased to have reached a broad agreement with Apple," O'Shaughnessy said. Creative plans to speak with other MP3 player companies about its patent, he said, but is not providing details on whether it has entered discussions with other companies.

As part of the agreement, Creative will also enter Apple's Made for iPod program as an authorized seller of iPod accessories. Creative will be able to affix the "Made for iPod" logo to its speakers, headphones and other related products, O'Shaughnessy said.
http://news.com.com/Apple+settles+wi...3-6108901.html





Dell Stops Selling Ditty Music Players
Matt Slagle

Dell Inc. has quietly pulled the plug on its DJ Ditty music players, less than a year after the world's largest computer maker launched the device to compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod Shuffle.

The company stopped selling the Ditty on Aug. 17, Dell spokesman Venancio Figueroa said Wednesday.

He declined to characterize the decision as Dell bowing out in the face of competition from market leader Apple. Dell is trying to focus on its core areas of PCs, printers and flat-panel televisions, he said.

Dell unveiled the Ditty last September as a better value than the Shuffle. Both devices store music on flash memory chips.

The Ditty, like the Shuffle, cost $99 at the time and included 512 megabytes of memory. But because the Dell device used an audio format that compresses digital music files more efficiently, Dell asserted it could hold up to 220 songs - 100 more than the Shuffle. The 512 megabyte Shuffle now retails for $69, with a one-gigabyte model for $99.

The Ditty also included a 1-inch LCD display screen and an FM radio receiver. The Shuffle lacks both features.

As of Wednesday afternoon, visitors to Dell's Web site could select from a range of music players from Creative Technology Ltd., iRiver, SanDisk Corp. and Samsung. The Ditty was not available, and Figueroa said the company's entire inventory has been sold.

Accessories such as lanyards were still available at a discount.

Dell entered the portable music player market in 2003 but struggled against competitors. In January, the Round Rock-based company discontinued its DJ line of hard drive-based devices.

Analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies said part of Dell's problem was its direct-sales model, which prevented consumers from trying out its devices before buying. But all manufacturers are having a tough time competing against Apple, which claims about 70 percent of the market, he said.

"It was never really a strategic product for them," he said. "It's a smart move to cut their losses and run."

Dell shares fell 8 cents Wednesday to close at $21.64 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Last week, Dell recalled 4.1 million laptop batteries because they could catch fire, posted a 51 percent drop in second quarter profits and revealed it was part of an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-23-19-28-37





Seeking to Reduce Environmental Impact of Burning Man
Daniel Terdiman

For years, the annual countercultural arts festival known as Burning Man has gained notoriety as one of the largest "leave no trace" events in the world.

And to be sure, Burners, as attendees are known, do such a good job of cleaning up after themselves that the Bureau of Land Management--which manages Nevada's Black Rock Desert, where the event is held--holds Burning Man up as an example of responsible land stewardship.

But anyone who's ever attended--and I've been eight times myself--knows that "leave no trace" is a little bit less than accurate, given the air pollution that comes from burning a giant wooden effigy as well as the countless other burns that take place during the event.

Well, now a group called Burners Without Borders is looking to offset at least some of that impact.

The group, which was formed to help clean up Biloxi, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina, has undertaken an initiative to offset as much greenhouse gas emissions as are created by burning The Man.

Apparently, the burn creates about 110 tons of greenhouse gases.

Thus, the group has begun a campaign to encourage Burners to plant trees, which absorb one ton of the gases each, support renewable energy projects--which can themselves offset other producers of greenhouse gases--or undertake other similar projects.

This may be a roundabout way of achieving the goal, but it's an admirable one and one that shows that the Burning Man community does have a conscience.
http://news.com.com/2061-10786_3-6106601.html





Screwed for Sure
Eliot Van Buskirk

The rumor mill is still buzzing about Microsoft's new Zune digital music player, but take your eyes off the device for a minute and you'll quickly see that the real news here has nothing to do with Microsoft, or even Apple.

Sure, everyone wants to see what the thing will look like; one site last week claimed to have obtained new details and an exclusive black-and-white picture (Microsoft reportedly used a color code to trace leaks).

Forget all that for a moment. The real story right now is the fate of Microsoft's partners -- companies that naively built products around the company's "PlaysForSure" Windows Media DRM. It's a fair guess that all of these companies are now screwed.

As I wrote before, I don't think Microsoft stands a chance against Apple's iTunes/iPod combo, in the short term, anyway. But the Zune ecosystem will blow away Microsoft's own PlaysForSure partners, mainly due to seamless device compatibility and branding dollars.

Given how little traction PlaysForSure products have in the marketplace, this won't be a disaster for consumers. But these PlaysForSure partners, soon to be competing with the mothership, will scramble to survive. Among other things, look for an ownership change at Napster, probably sooner rather than later. (My top pick for an acquirer is SanDisk, more on that later.)

To be fair, Microsoft told me that it plans on continuing to support its PlaysForSure partners. In other news, Castro's feeling great, the Iraq war is a cakewalk, and everybody loves Raymond. Expressing something doesn't make it true, unless you're writing code.

IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian, for one, predicts the company will gradually turn its back on the platform as it promotes Zune. It won't drop PlaysForSure like a hot potato; it'll leave it on the shelf until it goes bad. In a phone interview, she said Microsoft will be "backing off from its commitment to PlaysForSure gradually, over time, by not supporting it with additional resources that it will instead devote to new initiatives such Zune."

This makes a lot of sense. The DRM digital music market will soon be reduced to three sectors: Apple, Microsoft and PlaysForSure. Why would Microsoft continue to back a lame horse that it doesn't completely own, and which has consistently lost, when it has a new entry in the race, which it owns entirely, and which shares characteristics with the horse that's won the Triple Crown for the past five years? I think PlaysForSure will be put out to pasture.

This will come as a huge disappointment to Microsoft's hardware and software partners, who have stuck with the company through years of compatibility headaches, the botched launch of PlaysForSure subscriptions and the revelation that Microsoft's own Zune player will not support their stores despite this longstanding partnership. These partners have also been giving their internal numbers to Microsoft as part of the PlaysForSure licensing deal, giving Gates' crew insights into how their businesses work. Zune must feel like a serious betrayal of trust to PlaysForSure partners.

Even worse, I predict a final deathblow: Microsoft offering a voucher program that will allow people to convert songs purchased from PlaysForSure stores into the Zune format. This would encourage non-Apple users to buy a Zune device and sign up with Microsoft's new service. Who knows, Microsoft could also offer to match collections purchased from iTunes with the same songs in the Zune format; its pockets are certainly deep enough.

Companies such as Napster that depend on PlaysForSure will not survive, even if Microsoft makes good on its promise to support its partners. (In fact, I'd argue it never really supported them in the first place, as I'm sure many of its partners would agree.)

Napster will have a tougher time than partners like Yahoo Music Jukebox, AOL/MusicNet or Wal-Mart, because "playing for sure" is its only business. And despite a commendable effort to become the YouTube of music and a press release announcing record profits, Napster is already foundering (the same press release mentioned "reduce(ing) cash burn" and a 7 percent drop in subscribers during March).

This is where SanDisk comes in. The company makes its own flash memory (which is probably why it got into the MP3 player business in the first place), and sales of its MP3 players have been brisk. To understand how well they're doing, all you have to do is walk into a Circuit City. The company sold about a million players in America during the last holiday season, vaulting it into second place behind Apple.

If SanDisk wants to stay competitive as an MP3 player manufacturer in the iPod/Zune age, it will need a music store of its own, and I think it will acquire Napster. Neither SanDisk nor Napster responded to inquiries about the potential acquisition.

SanDisk doesn't have time to build the relationships with the labels Napster has built up over the years; it needs to launch something quickly. However, after the acquisition, I think it'll develop (or acquire) its own DRM scheme, rather than using the PlaysForSure program. This would enable SanDisk/Napster to create the sort of seamless digital music ecosystem pioneered by Apple and soon to be copied by Microsoft. Apple's success (and PlaysForSure's failure) have proven the seamless, one-store-one-line-of-devices ecosystem to be the only system that works.

As for the other PlaysForSure partners, they should probably think of similar plans, unless they want to go away for sure.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/li...rss.technology





Software Writes News Stories At Thomson
Anick Jesdanun

A new service from Thomson Corp.'s Thomson Financial issues articles generated by computer software, using templates and "a rich thesaurus ... so no two stories are exactly the same," said Andrew Meagher, the company's director of content development.

But Meagher admits flowery prose isn't the goal. The Thomson Earnings News service, he said, is intended for financial advisers, brokers, investment managers and others who are simply looking for the basics.

Two types of stories are currently being produced.

After a company issues its quarterly earnings report, a human types in the raw data, and the computer compares the information with analyst forecasts compiled by Thomson Financial's First Call service. Software then produces a story stating whether earnings exceeded or fell short of expectations.

Software also monitors minute changes in analysts' outlooks on various companies and can generate articles based on company or industry trends, Meagher said.

After stories go out, humans sometimes expand on them with phone calls and additional analyses, Meagher said, adding that no computer can capture nuances reported in press releases and on conference calls.

No jobs are being cut; reporters are merely shifting their focus, Meagher said.

"We're creating a tool that can be used by journalists to create a more interesting story so they are not spending time pouring over databases to (spot) some anomaly," he said.

Thomson has been using the software-produced stories since the service launched earlier this year. The service has about 12,000 individual subscribers in the United States.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-23-16-01-23





Logitech Unveils New Cordless Laser Mice
Jordan Robertson

Computer accessory maker Logitech International SA is introducing a mouse with a free-spinning motorized scroll wheel it believes will help people more efficiently race through pages on their computer screens.

The company said Thursday it is launching cordless laser mice with an alloy wheel that spins for up to 7 seconds and can scroll through up to 10,000 Microsoft Excel lines with a single flick. Users can stop the wheel by tapping it.

The desktop model can automatically switch back to traditional click-scrolling depending on the application, and can toggle back and forth on its own during a task depending on how fast the user is working.

A software program synched to the mouse can sense the user's application, and sends a signal to a small motor to engage or disengage the ratchets that regulate the wheel's speed during click-scrolling.

Clicking the wheel also allows users to switch back and forth.

Users of the laptop model will need to flip a switch on the base of the mouse to toggle between modes, which the company says is because of its smaller size and lack of internal motor.

Both mice are now shipping in the U.S. and Europe for PCs and Macs. They cost $79 for the laptop model and $99 for the desktop model in the U.S.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-24-07-46-37





Dept. of Chortles and Snorts

Perpetual Motion Claim Probed
John Borland

Sean McCarthy believes his small Irish high-tech company has overturned one of physics' most fundamental laws.

It happened by accident, he says. His company Steorn was looking for an efficient way to power closed-circuit TVs that spy on ATMs, and instead stumbled on a technique they think produces more energy than it consumes.

The company hasn't released specific details about the process, other than to say it involves magnetic fields configured in precisely the right way. Using the magnets results in a motor that's more than 100 percent efficient -- essentially creating energy, McCarthy says.

For scientists and engineers, this is the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, and is almost unanimously viewed as flat-out impossible. McCarthy, an affable former energy company engineer, knows just how preposterous his claims sound. So, he advertised in this week's Economist for a panel of the "most cynical possible" physicists to help validate them.

"If we're right, that will come out in due course," McCarthy says. "If we're wrong, that will come out. It's such a big claim that it has to be validated by experts."

A big claim it may be, but hardly original. The clamor of voices saying they've invented revolutionary new "free energy" technologies has grown tumultuous in recent years, driven perhaps by the internet's capacity to connect and inspire would-be tinkerers, or simply a that lay people are more fascinated with science.

The American Physical Society was worried enough about the trend a few years ago that its executive board put out a statement in June 2002, warning against such claims.

"(We are) concerned that in this period of unprecedented scientific advance, misguided or fraudulent claims of perpetual motion machines and other sources of unlimited free energy are proliferating," the group said. "Such devices directly violate the most fundamental laws of nature, laws that have guided the scientific progress that is transforming our world."

McCarthy says he's not using his claims to raise money, at least not yet. Steorn is privately funded, but is not seeking new investment until after the tests have been done, he contends.

The company has, however, filed patent applications on some of its work, and hopes to commercialize it by creating batteries for mobile phones and laptops, both markets that can respond quickly to new technologies. In the unlikely event it is borne out, it could also radically transform the automotive business and other industries.

The drive to create an engine that powers itself, or a self-replenishing source of energy, has long been a holy grail for the tinkering class, with a history stretching back nearly a thousand years. Like alchemy, its medieval pseudo-scientific counterpart, it has attracted high names and low, scientists and faith-based researchers, believers and outright scam artists.

Among the most notable investigators was Leonardo da Vinci, who included drawings of several self-driving devices inside his notebooks. However, he was publicly critical of such schemes, comparing them to the alchemical quest to transmute lead to gold.

Documenters of such schemes nevertheless find an unbroken string of subsequent proposals, tests, and failures that stretch to the present day, occasionally crossing over lines where would-be inventors are accused of running out-and-out con operations.

Perhaps the most famous recent claimant is a flamboyant only-in-America figure named Dennis Lee, who has spent much of the last decade churches and auditoriums across the United States promising "free electricity," among other inventions, and selling rights to open "dealerships" for thousands of dollars at a time. His efforts have led numerous state attorneys general offices to seek sanctions, including a recent string of fines and court orders in the state of Washington.

The flaw with such claims lies in one of the most fundamental principles in basic physics, known as the first law of thermodynamics.

In layman's terms, the first law states that energy is always conserved inside a closed system. It can be transformed into different forms inside the system, such as heat or work, but it can't be created or destroyed.

"Thermodynamics is largely an empirical field, and everything we've observed is consistent with the first law," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ian Waitz. "When you make enough observations over a long period of time, things that start as hypotheses turn into things we call law. This would be not consistent with all other observations, which is a reason to be skeptical."

In the past, most claimants haven't met a standard of ordinary proof, much less an extraordinary one required to overturn a fundamental pillar of modern science. In most cases, sincere claimants have found that they simply didn't calculate the energy produced and consumed correctly.

Some of the most flamboyant inventors have found that their devices were coincidentally broken or burned out when testing time rolled around. Others have simply been exposed as obvious frauds, with batteries or a generator hidden out of sight.

While outlandish, McCarthy's claims have stirred up enough interest to at least hope for a thorough vetting, if not confirmation.

His Economist ad, quoting playwright George Bernard Shaw's dictum that "All great truths begin as blasphemies," is seeking a jury panel of 12 physicists to perform public tests. Whatever the unorthodoxy of that approach, he says the researchers will have no constraints on their work. They will be given full access to the company's work, will be able to take the technology home to test in their own laboratories, or recreate the process themselves.

According to the company's website, nearly 1500 scientists have "expressed interest" in testing the technology as of late Monday, and more than 17,000 people had signed up to receive word of the results.

"Ultimately the aim is so large, that the people involved, and the process that goes on, has to be purer than pure," McCarthy says.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...1,71626-0.html





A Romance Novelist’s Heroines Prefer Love Over Money
Ginia Bellafante

The house where Nora Roberts has lived here for 34 years defies architectural classification. It rambles along in a zigzag line, its exterior bearing no reference to history or place. Inside, the furnishings are grandmotherly, not in the sense of a grandmother who once owned half of Maine, but rather in the vein of one inclined to shop for things on television.

Ms. Roberts collects ceramic frogs, for instance, has a painting of a scene from “Casablanca” on the wall of her tiny library and maintains a kitchen devoid of chrome, granite, a wine fridge or any other signifier of domestic aggrandizement. Were Danielle Steele ever to decide to trade houses with some other enormously successful purveyor of American popular fiction, one imagines she would phone John Grisham first.

With the publication next week of her 166th book, “Morrigan’s Cross,” Ms. Roberts remains one of the top-selling novelists of the last decade and the most prolific romance writer of all time. At 55 she has written more books than Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz and Ms. Steele combined.

Thirty-one of these books have made their debut at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, most recently “Angels Fall,” which was published by Putnam last month and tells the story of a young chef from Boston who moves west to flee ugly memories.

Like many of Ms. Roberts’s heroines, Reece Gilmore doesn’t seem to have everything and aspire to even more. What distinguishes Ms. Roberts from a lot of other writers like her is a certain indifference to the material ambition that often supplies the genre’s narrative girding. To read a Nora Roberts novel is not to feel as if you are flipping through a Neiman Marcus catalog. Wealth and glamour are neither the prerequisites nor essential residuals of falling in love. To marry is not necessarily to marry up.
“The financial aspect is not something I ever thought about much,” Ms. Roberts, who wears a silver ring on one thumb and smokes Winstons, said recently. “I think a lot of writers do a lot better job at analyzing their work than I do. I don’t know what inspires me, but I guess the Cinderella thing never really appealed.”

Romance is an expansive category in publishing and Ms. Roberts specializes in a subgenre known as romantic suspense. (Under the pseudonym J. D. Robb, she also writes police procedurals.) That term is at least semantically misleading, because while Ms. Roberts’s books always join the subjects of love and felony, the resolution of the principal affair is never in question. An impassioned woman at the center of a Sidney Sheldon novel might end up executed for murder, but the heroine of a Nora Roberts story will meet her destiny in the form of a nice guy who paints her living room.

“There’ll always be a satisfying ending, always,” Ms. Roberts explained. “People aren’t all going to end up dead. I’m not going to write ‘Anna Karenina.’ ”

Ms. Roberts grew up in Silver Spring, Md., the daughter of an Irish-American electrician and a homemaker who were third cousins and received a special dispensation from the pope to marry. By her account, theirs was a tremendous love affair.

Her most potent childhood memory involves an incident in which her older brothers were dispatched to care for her. During the half-hour the two boys got into a nasty fight, one quickly disrupted by their mother when she got back.

“My mother ran that house and that was power. At that moment I thought, ‘She is the power,’ ” Ms. Roberts said. “I think that’s why I was never going to write a book where a woman is waiting around for a man to take care of things.”

By the late 1970’s, Ms. Roberts was herself a married mother, with two small boys. Living in rural Keedysville, she had become addicted to bread baking and crafts. Sequestered indoors for a few days, during a blizzard in 1979, and looking for something else to preoccupy her, she decided to write a romance novel.

She produced it in longhand at 55,000 words and sent it to Harlequin, where it was rejected.

At the time Harlequin, a Canadian company based in Toronto, used writers almost exclusively from Britain. But in 1980 Simon & Schuster started an imprint, Silhouette, meant to be an American Harlequin. The house published Ms. Roberts’s next effort, “Irish Thoroughbred,” about a young Irish woman who becomes involved with an American stable owner.

Initially, though, the publisher resisted the story as too ethnic, recalled Ms. Roberts’s longtime agent, Amy Berkower. Ms. Roberts’s interest in hyphenated cultural identity did not end there. In the 90’s she wrote a series for Silhouette about the Stanislaskis, a family of Ukrainian-Americans.

The Americanization of the romance novel that took shape in the 80’s found its most powerful expression in the dismantling of class barriers between the men and women around whom the plots revolved. The heroes were now not always the richest men in the free world and the women were not all consigned to jobs as governesses.

“Nora was part of that early group that brought a more democratic approach to the stories, introducing the idea of economic and emotional parity,” said Leslie Wainger, executive editor of Harlequin, which now owns Silhouette.

For some writers, the interest in equilibrium now meant that everybody could be rich, but for Ms. Roberts it implied that a woman might be a schoolteacher and a man might drive a cab.

Not long into her career, Ms. Roberts divorced. Then, in 1985, she married a carpenter, Bruce Wilder. Mr. Wilder runs a bookstore that the couple bought near their home. He also takes pictures, many of them nudes of young women that line a wall in the couple’s bedroom. It was Ms. Roberts’s decision, she said, to display them.

A prude she is not and although sex receives plenty of attention in her books, it is not always the mechanism propelling the characters. They talk and they can sound, to a surprising degree, like real people.

“One of the things that romance in general has been criticized for is the notion that great sex equals great love for the characters,” said Leslie Gelbman, Ms. Roberts’s editor and the president and publisher of the Berkley Publishing Group. “Nora has played with this concept in several books, having heroines who are not only sexually experienced — in a few cases more experienced than the hero — but who realize that although sex is important in any romantic relationship, it doesn’t equate with love.”

Ms. Roberts, by her own admission, doesn’t dream of literary recognition. There is reason to believe her. In “Angels Fall,” Reece Gilmore gives up the high culinary life to work in a Wyoming diner. One day her boyfriend, Brody, a mystery writer, reminds her that flipping buffalo burgers isn’t going to win her “whatever the epicurean equivalent of the Pulitzer might be.” Her response? “I’d rather cook pot roast.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/books/23roberts.html





Music Makes Your Brain Happy
Randy Dotinga

As a rock producer, Daniel Levitin worked with Stevie Wonder, the Grateful Dead and Chris Isaak. But the music business began to change, and a disillusioned Levitin turned to academia, where a career in neuroscience beckoned.

Sixteen years after he made the switch, Levitin is an associate professor at McGill University in Montreal and one of the world's leading experts in cognitive music perception.

In his new book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Levitin explores research into how our brains process the works of artists as varied as Beethoven, the Beatles and Britney Spears, and why they make us feel so good. Wired News picks his brain about how it all works.

Wired News: Are there any myths about music that neuroscientists have exposed?

Daniel Levitin: I think we've debunked the myth of talent. It doesn't appear that there's anything like a music gene or center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else has.

There's no evidence that (talented people) have a different brain structure or different wiring than the rest of us initially, although we do know that becoming an expert in anything -- like chess or race-car driving or journalism -- does change the brain and creates circuitry that's more efficient at doing what you're an expert at.

What there might be is a genetic or neural predisposition toward things like patience and eye-hand coordination. (On the other hand), you can be born with a physiology that gives you a pleasant-sounding voice, but that doesn't guarantee you'll have a career as a singer.

WN: What does music tell us about the brain?

Levitin: Through studies of music and the brain, we've learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing and perception -- and production of sequences. They've told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation.

What we're learning about the part in the frontal lobe called BA47 is the most exciting. Music suggests that it's a region that helps us predict what comes next in a sequence.

WN: What have we learned about music perception from people with brain disorders or injuries?

Levitin: We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing. We see equivalents in the visual domain: People lose color perception or shape perception.

I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.

WN: You write that you're more interested in the mind than the brain. What's the difference?

Levitin: The brain is a bunch of neurons, chemicals, water and blood.... The mind is the thoughts that arise from the brain. Anatomists and neuroanatomists are particularly interested in understanding how the brain is formed and how cells communicate. They're really looking at the architecture and geography of the brain....

What we're trying to do is figure out (which) parts of the brain do what and how they communicate with each other. But not simply on a level of description that discusses only neuron and cells, but one that also talks about real ideas, thoughts and memories.

WN: From an evolutionary perspective, why have humans developed music?

Levitin: There are a number of different theories. One theory is that music is an evolutionary accident, piggybacking on language: We exploited language to create music just for our own pleasure. A competing view, one that Darwin held, is that music was selected by evolution because it signals certain kinds of intellectual, physical and sexual fitness to a potential mate.

WN: How does that play out in rock 'n' roll, for example?

Levitin: (Research has shown that) if women could choose who they'd like to be impregnated by, they'd choose a rock star. There's something about the rock star's genes that is signaling creativity, flexibility of thinking, flexibility of mind and body, an ability to express and process emotions -- not to mention that (musical talent) signals that if you can waste your time on something that has no immediate impact on food-gathering and shelter, you've got your food-gathering and shelter taken care of.

WN: Do any animals show an appreciation for music?

Levitin: There's no evidence they do -- that birdsong is used in the same way we (use it, for instance, or) that animals use it for recreation. And some of the fundamental things we take for granted about music don't exist in the animal kingdom.

WN: What are we learning about the link between music and emotion in the brain?

Levitin: Music activates the same parts of the brain and causes the same neurochemical cocktail as a lot of other pleasurable activities like orgasms or eating chocolate -- or if you're a gambler winning a bet or using drugs if you're a drug user. Serotonin and dopamine are both involved.

WN: Could music be an antidepressant?

Levitin: It is already -- most people in Western society use music to regulate moods, whether it's playing something peppy in the morning or something soothing at the end of a hard day, or something that will motivate them to exercise. Joni Mitchell told me that someone once said before there was Prozac, there was her.

WN: What is an earworm, and what doctor do I see if I get one?

Levitin: It's the name the Germans give to these songs that get stuck in your head that you can't get rid of. If they're really bothersome, you can do what Neil Young told me: Become a professional songwriter. He writes songs to get them out of his head.

Failing that, the second thing you can do is go to a doctor and have them prescribe an antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug like Prozac or Ativan. Or the most common option, find an equally annoying song that's not bothering you right now, and it will replace the earworm with another one.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...?tw=wn_index_2





Weird Al's Anthem For Music Pirates
Neha Tiwari

With his 12th album, "Straight Outta Lynwood," set to release on Sept. 26, parody artist "Weird Al" Yankovic yet again is up to no good (which is, after all, why we like him). His first single off the album, "Don't Download This Song," tackles the all-too-apparent (and oh-so-1999) MP3 piracy matter. The music video depicts an animated crazed youth drawn to his computer to "break international copyright laws."

The lyrics imply that downloading music is the gateway to bigger crimes such as robbing liquor stores, selling crack and running over kids with your car. Weird Al's song, of course, hyperbolizes the issue and sides with us (ahem, the downloaders). "Don't Download This Song" says we should go buy CDs so that artists can buy more ridiculous items, like diamond palm trees.

Yankovic has been known for songs that parody hot issues to the tunes of popular songs. What popular music melody is Yankovic ripping this time? The 1985 pop composition, "We Are the World." Interestingly enough, "We Are the World" united artists to raise funds for famine relief in Africa. Perhaps Weird Al is trying to express to music artists his dismay of their union against such an inane topic, rather than real issues like starvation in the Third World. Or perhaps this song will be the downloaders' anthem against the artists, like the lyrically mentioned drummer of Metallica, Lars Ulrich.

Ironically, you can download this song on Weird Al's MySpace.com page, or for a better-quality version, download the song here. Want to listen to it for a laugh now? Click here.
http://news.com.com/2061-10786_3-6108913.html





The Fame Motive
Benedict Carey

Money and power are handy, but millions of ambitious people are after something other than the corner office or the beach house on St. Bart’s. They want to swivel necks, to light a flare in others’ eyes, to walk into a crowded room and feel the conversation stop. They are busy networking, auditioning, talking up their latest project — a screenplay, a memoir, a new reality show — to satisfy a desire so obvious it is all but invisible.

“To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said Kaysar Ridha, 26, of Irvine, Calif., a recent favorite of fans of the popular CBS reality series “Big Brother.” “It’s strange and twisted, because when that attention does come, the irony is you want more privacy.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.

People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.

These yearnings can become more acute in life’s later years, as the opportunities for fame dwindle, “but the motive never dies, and when we realize we’re not going to make it in this lifetime, we find some other route: posthumous fame,” said Orville Gilbert Brim, a psychologist who is completing a book called “The Fame Motive.” The book is based on data he has gathered and analyzed, with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“It’s like belief in the afterlife in medieval communities, where people couldn’t wait to die and go on to better life,” Dr. Brim said. “That’s how strong it is.”

The urge to achieve social distinction is evident worldwide, even among people for whom prominence is neither accessible nor desirable. In rural Hindu villages in India, for instance, widows are expected to be perpetual mourners, austere in their habits, appetites and dress; even so, they often jockey for position, said Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist in the department of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.

“Many compete for who is most pure,” Dr. Shweder said. “They say, ‘I don’t eat fish, I don’t eat eggs, I don’t even walk into someone’s house who has eaten meat.’ It’s a natural kind of social comparison.”

In media-rich urban centers, the drive to stand out tends to be more oriented toward celebrity, and its hold on people appears similar across diverse cultures.

Surveys in Chinese and German cities have found that about 30 percent of adults report regularly daydreaming about being famous, and more than 40 percent expect to enjoy some passing dose of fame — their “15 minutes,” in Andy Warhol’s famous phrase — at some point in life, according to data analyzed by Dr. Brim. The rates are roughly equivalent to those found in American adults. For teenagers, the rates are higher.

Yet for all the dreamers, only one or two in 100 rate fame as their most coveted goal, trumping all others, the data collected by Dr. Brim and others show.

“It’s a distinct type, people who expect to get meaning out of fame, who believe the only way to have their lives make sense is to be famous,” said Tim Kasser, a psychologist at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “We all need to make meaning out of our lives, and this is one way people attempt to do it.”

Therapists and researchers, including Dr. Brim, have traced longing for renown to lingering feelings of rejection or neglect. After all, celebrity is the ultimate high school in-group, writ large. It appears a perfect balm for the sting of social exclusion, or neglect by emotionally or physically absent parents.

In her memoir, “In the Shadow of Fame,” Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of the renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, writes, “He had the kind of charisma that made people hungry to know him — to become privy to what he was thinking and feeling and writing about.”

Dr. Erikson’s dogged pursuit of recognition, she writes, was partly due to a sense of abandonment: he never knew his biological father, who disappeared before he was born. Decades later, Dr. Erikson still sought comfort and guidance from others, “but his pursuit of reassurance was not simply the charming humility it was generally interpreted to be,” she writes. “It expressed a persistent and tormenting self-doubt.”

Another factor may also be at work in many people who are preoccupied with becoming famous, one linked to a subconscious but acute appreciation of mortality. In recent experiments, psychologists have shown that, when reminded that they will one day die, people fixate on attributes they consider central to their self-worth.

Those who value strength squeeze a hand grip with more force; those who prize driving ability, cooking skills or physical appearance intensify their focus.

“Given this awareness of our mortality,” said Jeffrey Greenberg, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, “to function securely, we need to feel somehow protected from this existential predicament, to feel like we are more than just material animals fated only to obliteration upon death.

“We accomplish that by trying to view ourselves as enduringly valuable contributors to a meaningful world. And the more others validate our value, the more special and therefore secure we can feel.”

The odds of achieving some measure of notoriety — a Nobel, an Oscar, a plaque in the Curling Hall of Fame — are so remote that it is no surprise when unrealized ambition curdles into psychological struggle.

In a 1996 study, Richard M. Ryan of the University of Rochester and Dr. Kasser, then at Rochester, conducted in-depth surveys of 100 adults, asking about their aspirations, guiding principles, and values, as well as administering standard measures of psychological well-being.

The participants in the study who focused on goals tied to others’ approval, like fame, reported significantly higher levels of distress than those interested primarily in self-acceptance and friendship.

Surveys done since then, in communities around the world, suggest the same thing: aiming for a target as elusive as fame, and so dependent on the judgments of others, is psychologically treacherous.

Freud might have agreed: he is said to have fainted only twice in his life, both times when he perceived a threat to his legacy.

What of fame-seekers who actually slip through the looking glass and make it? Few celebrities confess to their fame-yearnings, and few if any have consented to anything like a psychological study of motivation and psychological well-being. And someone at the center of a scandal has an experience different from a beloved writer of children’s books.

Many prominent novelists, actors, writers and musicians find lasting satisfaction in seeing others moved by their work. And the limos and V.I.P. seating and private beach parties cannot be too difficult to endure.

Still, scholars, psychologists and some celebrity memoirists seem to agree that, for all its rewards, fame can also eat its own — as the historian Leo Braudy has written, “lurking behind every chance to be made whole by fame is the axman of further dismemberment.”

Public recognition can bring a heightened focus on the self. Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, studied the careers of Kurt Cobain, Cole Porter and John Cheever.

In their works, Dr. Schaller found, all three of these artists began referring to themselves more frequently after they became famous. The increase was slight in the case of Mr. Cobain, the rock star who committed suicide in 1994 at age 27. It was far more pronounced in Mr. Porter’s songs, and in the stories of Mr. Cheever, who also reported drinking more heavily after receiving wide acclaim.

These three artists are hardly a representative sample, and each probably had some self-destructive tendencies before achieving popular success. But increased self-consciousness can plunge almost anyone into rumination over soured relationships or lost opportunities, psychologists find. And famous people in particular are forced to judge themselves against ideals set by others.

“If you or I hear our own voice on tape, or see ourselves on camera, we might say: ‘Wait a minute, I’m a doofus. I’m not the sharp guy I thought I was,’ and we can cope with that, we can try harder,” Dr. Schaller said. “But it’s a little different if you’re a Bruce Willis or somebody. The ideals others have for you are crazy. It’s virtually impossible to meet them, and you can’t escape this heightened self-awareness.”

None of which may dissuade a single soul from grabbing for the ring if given a chance — or from longing and half-expecting lightning to strike. Because who really knows? Fame is fickle, sometimes random, and its effect on any one person is not predictable. Perhaps that is the source of its catnip fragrance: the unknowns, the secret horrors and joys, the private alchemy revealed only to those for whom the door swings open.

In compiling his research, Dr. Brim, 83, thought much about how an intense desire to reach this unknowable, alluring state of being might affect older people’s behavior, if the motive did not fade.

“I concluded that several things could happen, and one of them is to find another source of approval,” he said. “That might be a great love, if you’re lucky. Or perhaps it is a deepening belief in God. But I think many people suffer with realization that they are not going to be famous and there’s nothing they can do to solve it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/he...732&ei=5087%0A





Making Room for the Hopeless Pop Star in a Crowd of Professional Amateurs
Kelefa Sanneh

It has been four years since the first “American Idol” was broadcast, and TV is full of musical amateurs in search of their big break. Or is it?

If you’ve been watching many of the post-“Idol” musical reality shows, you might have noticed that most of these putative amateurs behave an awful lot like old pros. Think of the not-so-regular folks on CBS’s “Rock Star: Supernova,” most of whom have spent years on the fringes of the music industry. Or think of the young women who were plucked from obscurity to be the stars of “Making the Band 3,” on MTV. It’s clear they take their budding careers seriously; they were acting like industry veterans even before they had a name (Danity Kane), a debut album (“Danity Kane”), a record label (Bad Boy/Atlantic) and a release date (this past Tuesday).

Don’t worry. There are still a few naïve musical dreamers, rushing in where angels fear to tread. You just have to know where to look.

Why, just this last weekend a charmingly inept rapper made his television debut, boldly ignoring all the advisers who must have asked him not to. And on Tuesday, the same day that Danity Kane CD’s arrived on record racks, a blithe aspiring pop star released her debut album, brushing off suggestions that singing be left to actual singers.

O.K., so the rapper, Kevin Federline, and the singer, Paris Hilton, aren’t exactly unknown. But in the world of pop music, they’re definitely underdogs. Mr. Federline, who is still best known as Mr. Britney Spears, made his debut at that famous hip-hop launching pad, the Teen Choice Awards, which were broadcast by Fox. And a video of his performance swiftly topped the most-viewed list on YouTube.com; the reviews were every bit as gentle and mild as online reviews usually are. (One typical comment: “omg!!! my eyes and ears hurt!!!! plz help.”)

Ms. Hilton, more pro-active than Mr. Federline and no more shy, left nothing to chance. Even before her debut CD, “Paris” (Warner Brothers), arrived in stores, it had already earned a glowing review, though not an unbiased one. She gave Blender magazine her opinion of her own CD, saying, “I, like, cry when I listen to it, it’s so good.” Even a low-level “American Idol” castoff would know better than to say something that ridiculous to an interviewer. So thank, like, goodness for Ms. Hilton.

Like many reality shows, “Idol” and “Rock Star” and “Making the Band” are televised job auditions, and so they reinforce the notion that being a pop star is hard work. In these worlds, being unprofessional isn’t charming; it’s shameful. During a famous exchange on “Rock Star,” Dave Navarro, one of the hosts, asked Patrice Pike, a contestant, to “switch it up.” She pointedly asked him whether he followed his own advice. And he countered with a withering reminder: “The difference is that I have a job.”

No surprise, then, that after months of coaching and hectoring and mentoring from Diddy, the women of Danity Kane created a grimly competent debut album. It’s often dull (starting with the inert debut single, “Show Stopper”) and occasionally effective (especially when they get a fast, sleek beat to play with, as on “Want It”). The whole thing sounds pretty professional, though, and who knows? Maybe these job seekers would consider that high praise.

No doubt Diddy would never let one of his rapper-protégés make his national performing debut seated at a grand piano, before an audience of squealing teens. But then, Mr. Federline can afford to set his own agenda; he seems to be rapping mainly because there’s no one who can stop him. So there he was, jumping up from the piano bench, throwing on a white cap and clumsily insisting, “The lifestyle, the rich living, the fast cars/Don’t hate ’cause I’m a superstar.” No doubt the 11-year-old haters in the crowd took notice.

Unlike Mr. Federline, Ms. Hilton has already got herself a hit: “Stars Are Blind,” a lilting and quite pleasant Gwen Stefani-ish love song. It made a respectable run on the Billboard’s Hot 100 chart (reaching No. 18), and it almost allowed listeners to forget who was singing it. Almost, except for the shameless double entendre in the refrain: “If you show me real love, baby/I’ll show you mine.” Pure Paris, whatever that is.

“Paris,” the CD, is evidently a vanity project; the packaging includes nearly as many photographs of the singer (10) as tracks (11). And some of the lightweight love songs, like the sleek disco throwback “I Want You,” work pretty well. But throughout, you get the welcome feeling that Ms. Hilton isn’t taking any of this too seriously. Wasting no time in getting to her beloved catchphrase, she whispers, “It’s hot,” six seconds into the first song. And the album, which lasts less than 40 minutes, ends with a perfectly useless version of the Rod Stewart hit “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.”

Needless to say, most listeners will be able to make it through “Paris” without crying. But the CD should help refine the common notion that Ms. Hilton is famous for doing nothing. She is, on the contrary, famous for being able to do whatever she wants, which makes her the exact opposite of your average aspiring star. Ms. Hilton and Mr. Federline have this, at least, in common: Neither of them is looking for a job.

The urge to laugh at them is understandable; they do seem pretty green, especially compared to those battle-hardened aspirants on reality television. But let’s be gentle with our moonlighting celebrities. They might be the only real amateurs we’ve got.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/ar...ic/24sann.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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